Canon PIXMA MP610 Review: Great All-In-One & Photo Printer

 Printing is great. Obviously not the kind of quality and speed you’ll get from a monstrous laser printer, but quick by inkjet standards (a couple seconds a page for text, and only a bit more for small or medium images in there, full page images are still relatively quick, around 10-16 seconds), and perfectly acceptable for professional documents like contracts and resumes. With appropriate paper; invitations, cards, menus, sales materials and so on can be prepared to standards almost as high as a good printing shop’s, and far higher than a bad one's. Cannon actually has an exhaustive supply of templates and instructions for a variety of printing and craft projects at their Creative Park website.

The scanner is also superlative. Leather tooling, and other decorative crafts, often rely on hand tracing certain elements of a photo onto translucent paper to use as a pattern. Scanning pictures and patterns allows changing scale, reflections, overlaying different elements like text, and almost endless possibilities that would be at least time consuming if not impossible to perform by hand. This requires that the scanner can reproduce details well though, not only from photographs, but the traced patterns. And scanners seem to hate that translucent paper, particularly since one uses pencil to avoid reworking.

The MP610 delivers not only detailed scans of detailed pictures, but does a reasonably good job of picking up the pencil on translucent paper mess described above. Reasonably good may not sound great, but other AIOs I’ve used required that I go over the pencil with a black pen to have the scanner pick up anything at all. And the lamp warms up very quickly.

 Like in normal printing, you get what you pay for, and more expensive, specialized, and complicated equipment can do a better job. But the MP610 is as good as the drug store (thought not a high-end photo lab), and you didn’t have to get out of your bathrobe. Unless you have a pretty nice camera and very high standards, or plan on printing an album or two a week, you should be good to go with the 610.

Obviously, photo printing uses special paper. By including two paper sources, a feature usually only found on far more expensive printers, Canon has done you a big favor. You can keep your day to day paper in the bottom tray and use the rear tray for special jobs. Anyone who has had to find somewhere to put down a bunch of paper while they stick in another kind will immediately appreciate this.

 While the concept of a stand alone printer that lets you browse and print pictures without a computer is nothing new, and is included with the MP610 via an LCD screen and control wheel surrounded by buttons, Canon has the screen and controls perform double duty. Instead of just including photo printing and basic scanning and copying functions, there are an impressive number of things you can do without firing up your computer.

Instead of scanning, then using software to crop, rotate and blow up an image included in a page of text, before sending it back to the printer, the 610 lets you perform all of these tasks as part of making one photocopy. Plus you can preview what you are working on in the little screen. There is enough functionality in the printer that I often bypass using software tools, even if my PC is on, for things like cropping.