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The Canon MF6550 is more than adequately packaged and protected to survive shipping without incident. It comes with a "starter" cartridge, only good for 1,000 pages or so. Search for "canon 106 cartridge" via Google for the full cartridge, good for printing 5,000 pages [with 5% coverage]. This machine uses a single cartridge system; some models need two [different] cartridges, which is more expensive to operate.
After installing the toner cartridge and putting paper in the tray, I plugged it into a 110v outlet, connected it via a USB 2.0 cable to the PC, plugged-in the provided RJ11 phone cable (for faxing) to a wall-jack. I then turned the device and the PC on; the PC immediately recognized the MF6550 as new hardware and requested insertion of the installation CD [supplied by Canon]. After inserting the CD, it took about 10 minutes to go through this process, and everything worked as it should. The machine was ready for printing immediately, and there were no glitches during software installation. I later noticed that the manual said to not connect the USB cable until the software was installed, but not doing that didn't seem to hurt anything. I don't read documentation unless I'm stumped. My PC is a fairly new, high-end Dell, running XP Service Pack II.
The installation process asks whether the MF6550 is connected to a PC or if it's a network printer. I chose the former. We have two PC's in our home office. The other PC has an HP LaserJet directly cabled to it. Using standard XP networking, each printer works from either PC, as long as that PC is turned on. The PCs connect through a Linksys WRT54GS router using RJ45 network patch cables.
No USB interface cable is provided, so you'll need to get that separately.
A major reason to buy such a machine, assuming you need the functions it provides, is to reduce the amount of table space otherwise required with individual machines. Of course, if you need these functions, a comparable scanner, copier, fax, and printer would also cost far more. Canon's sales pitch of this being a suitable machine for a small business implies that it will last many years in a home-office setting. The 3-year warranty, with one year on site, is evidence that Canon has confidence in their product operating in a SOHO (small office/home office) setting.
Copying:
This machine does all the obvious things, and does them well; e.g., reduce to 50%, enlarge to 200%, copy up to 99 copies per original, feed stock from the secondary supply tray, etc.. You can use the Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) as in any capable office copier, or open the platen glass cover and set your document on the platen. You can adjust resolution (dots per inch) and/or density, collate the output, automatically print two-sided documents from one or two sided originals, copy two pages to each page (automatically reduces two documents to fit on the selected paper size). It has a "frame erase" feature to eliminate shadows and lines that appear when copying various types of documents. The automatic duplex printing is impressive to watch - it prints on one side and ejects most of the page into the tray; then pulls it back into the machine and prints the other side. A marvel of engineering, and another labor saver when compared to manual two-sided printing. This machine replaces our now-dead $800 Xerox home copier that only did the basic copy functions.
Scanning:
One reason we bought this machine was to scan old printed music, which is sometimes larger than letter-sized material. Most consumer copier/scanners on the market can't handle legal-sized paper. I did a test scan of a newspaper page using the full platen option - this showed the maximum area this machine scans is 8 3/8" by 13 7/8". The actual platen glass is 10 1/4" by 15 1/4". A legal-sized scan takes 30 seconds, not counting setting parameter choices and dealing with the results. There are scanners on the market with even larger platens, but they cost far more than this model, and are aimed at businesses.
Anyone used to a low-cost flat bed scanner will be thrilled to have a scanner with Automatic Document Feed (ADF). Put a 50 page document in the hopper, press a few buttons, and the machine creates a 50-page file (PDF) or 50 files (BMP, JPEG, or TIFF). Walk away and do something else while it's scanning, if you need to. A huge labor and time saver compared to page-at-a-time-scanners, but of course, this feature is only useful if the scanning job lends itself to auto feed. When ADF-scanning with the resolution set to 50 to 300 dpi, the MF6550 whizzes along at 1 page every 5.5 seconds. Setting the resolution to 400 or 600 slows scanning to 1 page every 24 seconds. It ADF-scans at the same speed regardless of the type of file(s) you told it to create. The machine can be used a printer during the scan process.
OCR:
As a test, I put the Canon Limited Warranty page on the platen and selected the OCR function. The Warranty is a full page of small light-print legalese.
After scanning, an error message appeared: "OmniPage SE Failed to update the system registry. Please try using REGEDIT." Perhaps it won't happen on your PC, but on mine, this error message popped up after every OCR file was created. Here's how to eliminate this annoying message:
- click START, select RUN, enter "regedit" and click OK
- navigate to "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Omnipage.Document"
- right click on that, and select Permissions
- select your userid from the first table
- select"Allow - Full Control"
- select Apply, then OK
The software correctly converted all 1,362 words from that Canon document, with the same font/font size/capitalization/format as the original. Some words didn't pass OmniPage's spell checker, but the software still interpreted every letter correctly. The output file is saved with a suffix of .rtf. Double click that file and it opens in Microsoft Word and looks as though you've typed the document. You can then modify the text, copy it, etc. Pretty amazing. To upgrade from the included basic SE version to the full version, called OmniPage 15, will cost extra. The full version has more functionality; e.g., to also OCR directly from PDF format.
Software:
The principle software included with this machine is MF Toolbox version 4.9. It's a later version of the Canon ScanGear Toolbox software that came with earlier Canon flatbed scanners such as the N1220U. A shortcoming of the new software, versus ScanGear, is that Canon removed the perfectly logical [optional] feature to automatically forward a scanned file to a program (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) for viewing. This later software version requires a click of the "forward" button for each scan, which is a labor waster. The output file isn't even created until the forward button is clicked, so this is a required step.
When scanning in black & white, MF Toolbox's "threshold" defaults to 72 (out of 0 to 255), instead of, in my opinion, the more logical midpoint of 128 used in ScanGear. The result is that, if you leave it at 72, some scans are so faint, you have to re-do them. By adjusting threshold, you can sharpen and darken characters in a text document and reduce back-printing such as in newspapers. That is, if the original results in a too-faint copy, bump up the threshold setting - if it's too dark, lower the threshold setting. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to make YOUR choice of threshold the new default, which means setting threshold every time you scan something. This doesn't take much time if using the ADF with many pages to scan (unless you have to re-scan the whole thing because Threshold was set too low). However, when scanning pages by carefully setting each one the platen, resetting threshold for each page is a royal pain in the keister. This is particularly inexplicable, since Canon's years-old ScanGear (e.g., version 2.2) scanning software didn't have this problem.
Here's [an undocumented] way to have the threshold window appear each time, so at least you're reminded to set it: click PDF, Scan-1, or Scan-2; select "Display the Scanner Driver"; click START, double click the 1/2 shaded box below "image settings" (which brings up a mini-window for Threshold); and drag that mini-window into the image settings area. It's that drag step that the documentation fails to mention.
Fax:
Our family had no immediate need for a fax, so we haven't studied that function. Based on the Basic Guide's 39 pages on Fax features however, I might need a training course. I do know that simply plugging your land-line phone in the phone jack of the MF6550 doesn't work. First time our phone rang, we couldn't talk to the caller. I unplugged the RJ11C plug and will get to this some other time. This is unlikely a fault of the MF6550, since I had made no settings as to how/when it was to receive fax calls.
The Canon MF6530 is the same machine, minus the fax function.
Multi-processing:
As mentioned earlier, you can be scanning concurrently while printing, a great labor and time saver. You can also copy or scan while receiving faxes.
Duplex Printing:
To duplex print a document from your PC, do a Ctrl/P, click on properties, click on "finishing", under print style, select 2-sided printing, click OK, click on print (or OK, depending on which program you're printing from). The MF6550 will automatically print every other page on the reverse side. This not only saves 50% on paper, it's like having your own printing press!
Documentation:
For the most part, the documentation is...Read more›
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