Review: Canon PIXMA MP600

an affordable and performing all-in-one solution

I recently bought a new Canon PIXMA MP600 all-in-one printer.
I used to have a Epson Stylus Photo, that I bought back in May 2001, that has always been giving me lots of headaches. Two weeks ago it broke down and stopped responding completely.
I’ve been interested in getting a new printer for months and this finally gave me the chance of getting rid of my old Epson.

I needed an office printer (for documents, invoices, enveloppes, etc.), a photo printer (for photos, designs, illustrations, etc.) and also a desktop scanner, because my 1999 HP ScanJet never worked with my Macs. Ideally I wanted to get three separate hi-level products, but that didn’t fit my budget (and my desk too), so I went for an all-in-one solution.

I focused on Canon products, as I already own a Canon digital camera and because of their known compatibility with Macs. I finally decided to get a Canon PIXMA MP600 and it turned out to be a good choice.

Look
First, let’s start with saying that, like many Canon products, the MP600 has a sleek silver look with shiny black finishes. It’s not as beautiful as the black iP8500, but you won’t feel ashamed of having it on your desk or shelf.
Even if quite big, the MP600 has a compact look with no external paper loading trays.

Built-in Controls
The 2.5″ wide TFT colour display, apart from being beautiful, is very useful for an office printer, since it lets you control the printer when your PC is turned off. Then you can control all menus and functions from a very intuitive to use, iPod-like click wheel.
In general, menus are easy to use even for non-experienced users, and, for example, it is very easy to print directly from a Compact Flash card or to make simple copies of your documents.

Printing functions
Like any modern printer, the MP600 has the ability to read and print directly from memory cards (CF, SD and many other formats) and to print on CDs and DVDs (5 Maxell printable CD-Rs are provided with the printer by the way).
One thing I find particularly useful is the ability to print a thumbnails index of what is on your memory card. The MP600 automatically adapts the thumbs size basing on the paper size and the number of pictures.
For Canon digital cameras there is the possibility to print directly from the camera with the PictBridge technology. I’ve not tried this functionality so far, as I do a bit of photo-editing on my photos before printing them.

The MP600 uses ChomaLife inks (5 separate tanks, CMYK and photographic black) and the Canon FINE printing technology, which means brighter colours, smaller ink drops and more detailed prints.

Scanning functions
Well, it scans documents for office use. Period. Don’t expect spectacular scanning quality or detail. And no tray for DIA or negatives. However, as I said, it is not meant to be a professional, photo-quality scanner. It is just a good quality office scanner.
Using the provided utility (I used only the Mac version) it is pretty much impossible to get good results, but if you go straight to the driver and use it in advanced mode, you can increase quality dramatically.
From the driver you can control every parameter, resolution (up to 2400×4800 optical), colour depth (up to 48 bit) enable/disable noise reduction and other filters, adjust colours, detail and contrast.

Other functions
Using a USB 2.0 hi-speed connection, the MP600 can also be used as memory cards reader for CFs, SDs and other formats.
I use this function a lot, since pretty much every digital camera, including professional ones, come with slow USB 1.1 cables (if you’re lucky!). The card reader slot is on the front of the printer, in a very accessible place.

Tests
Normal office prints are very fast and fonts are printed extremely well.
Printed colours are very close to the colours on my screen, out-of-the-box with no further colour profiling needed. This is a big difference from my old Epson, whose colour matching was far from perfect.

Photo prints are of excellent quality and take a reasonable time.
At full resolution the results are really impressive. Detail is very good and you cannot see ink drops or lines on the print.
I made these tests using hi-quality glossy photo paper and 8 Megapixel RAW taken with a Canon PowerShot Pro 1 and edited with Photoshop.

On plain 10×15 cm photo paper, printing from a CF containing 4MP photos taken with a Canon IXUS 400 with no futher editing, the print quality is still very high, but, quite obviously, colour, contrast and detail are not exceptional.

Moreover, as far as I tested it, the MP600 doesn’t drink too much ink, even on photographic prints. By the way, Canon inks aren’t very expensive.

Installation and included software
Installation doesn’t take more than a 5 minutes and even a monkey could do it with no problems. The USB 2.0 cable is not provided, so you got to buy one separately.

As usual, there is a lot of (useless) included software, both for Win and Mac.
I’ve used none of the many utilities but the printer control panel and the scanner driver.

Some less good notes now
It’s not very small (about 45×35 cm), so it won’t fit every desktop. However the paper is loaded from an internal tray, like in laser printers, so it doesn’t require much space around it.

The MP600 could also print wirelessly, using a Bluetooth adapter. The bad side is that the Bluetooth doesn’t come along with the printer and is extremely expensive.

If you wish to use the printer on a LAN, then look for the MP600R. Same printer. but with built-in 10/100 Ethernet port.
There is about a 100 Euros difference between the two versions, so my advice would be, for that price, to get yourself a good print-server instead.

Overall vote
In the end, I have to say I’m very satisfied with the PIXMA MP600, and it’s worth the 190 Euros I payed for it.
It could be a really affordable and performing solution for anyone who’s looking for an office all-in-one product, but won’t disappoint those who want to print their photos and are looking for high quality prints.

If I had to give it a vote, it would be 8 out of 10.

Reference
You can read more and view technical specs on Canon’s websites:
Canon Italy
Canon UK
Canon USA

Here you can get a PDF brochure of the PIXMA MP600.

—————————
Updated 19.01.2007:

I’ve recently tried to print on a printable CD-R and the result was simply amazing. The print process was very fast and the quality exceeded my expectations.

Another important thing to say: today Patrick emailed me to inform me that the U.S. version of MP600 ships without the CD-R tray, so it must be bought separately. The European version comes with the tray included.

This review is provided as is. It has no promotional purpose. Please do not email me questions or support requests about the hardware of software reviewed in this page. Use the comments below instead. Thank you.