Canon SmartBase MPC600F

The Smartbase MPC600F is Canon's latest multifunction device that combines a colour scanner, inkjet printer and fax machine. It also offers full-colour copying capabilities.

The price of £315.24 (ex. VAT) aims it at the small-business market and, with a compact footprint of only 58 by 44cm, it should fit in even the smallest office.

The centre of the MPC600F's front panel has three illuminated buttons to select function and a numerical pad for entering copy quantity or manually entering fax numbers (over 100 can be stored).

Next to the numerical pad are the unit's Stop and Start buttons. To the right are speed dial and other fax-related controls. There's also a two-line 20-character LCD, navigation buttons for the menu system and controls to select paper size, image quality, contrast and enlarge/reduce image size.

All functions (except printing) can be initiated from the front panel or the MPC600F's software installed on your system.

The printer is based around Canon's Bubble Jet S630 colour print engine. With a duty cycle of 5,000 pages per month, it's more suitable for business use than domestic inkjet printers.

It has a resolution of 2,400 by 1,200dpi and a claimed print speed of 17ppm for monochrome and 12ppm for colour, but these speeds are hard to achieve in practice.

Monochrome output is of good quality when printing documents from a PC or scanning a page of text but, when printing monochrome scans containing large dark areas, output suffers from banding and the printed page is wet when ejected.

Colour output suffers none of these ills. Paper quality can have a marked effect on subjective output quality, which suffers if you use standard copier stock.

An automatic document feeder with a capacity of 30 pages means the MPC600F can be loaded and left to scan, copy or fax large jobs. The scanner has an optical resolution of 600 by 1,200spi and the fax can be set up to send in colour, unless it detects a monochrome receiving device.

Colour copying can take over two minutes per A4 page at the highest setting, although this drops to less than half this time in the default quality mode.

Price: £315.24 (ex. VAT)

Specifications:

OS: Windows 9x, ME, 2000, NT 4.0, XP
Engine technology: colour inkjet
Memory: 4.3Mb
Duty cycle: 5,000 page per month

Contact: Canon 0800 616 417
www.canon.co.uk

See also:

Brother MFC-590

An all-in-one inkjet printer, scanner, colour copier and plain-paper fax  26 Feb 2003

HP PSC2110

A useful multifunction device for the small office or home.  14 Feb 2003

Epson Stylus CX3200

A good all-rounder from Epson.  10 Feb 2003

HP PSC 2210

The PSC 2210 has everything you need for printing, scanning and faxing  28 Jan 2003

Lexmark X75

Enter the space race with this integrated scanner and printer from Lexmark.  24 Oct 2002

Hewlett Packard Officejet d155xi

A great device that challenges the category's reputation for compromise.  23 Jul 2002

Samsung SCX-1100

All-in-one printer, scanner and copier.  31 May 2002

Lexmark X73

An all-in-one device for you to print, scan and copy on a budget.  22 Jan 2002

Hewlett Packard OfficeJetV40

The OfficeJet V40 can print, fax, copy and scan.  13 Sep 2001

Hewlett Packard OfficeJet K80

Space-saving, quality output from this combined fax, printer and scanner.  20 Mar 2001

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