Canon Pixma MP530 Office All-In-One Inkjet Photo Printer
by Canon
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List Price: Our Price: $160.00 You Save: $137.92 (46%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Canon Pixma MP530 Office All-In-One Inkjet Photo Printer
Customer Review: Hard to Find, But Well Worth It
Summary: 5 Stars
The Canon Pixma MP530 is, indeed, hard to find in stores. Having seen it on Canon's website, I was intrigued but could never find one anywhere for a hands-on look. I had decided to go with Canon's more expensive MP850, until I stumbled upon a 530 over the weekend. I've used it now for a few days and am very pleased.
The 530 is quite compact for a multifunction (with FAX) machine, with a more sleek design than the larger 850. One nice feature is that paper can be loaded from a closed tray at the bottom and the print "finished" door pops open when a document is printing, so you can keep the entire machine closed when not in use - no slides and trays poking up and out all the time. It fits nicely and looks great in my small home office.
The front panel is nicely arranged and the buttons are mostly self-explanatory. I had no difficulty figuring out the basic functions without looking at the manual. The LCD panel is a bit small, and not full color, and thus is useful only for programming the machine and receiving basic feedback.
Print and scan quality is very good - as good as I've seen from an inkjet - and print speed is fine for a medium-volume home office setting. In addition to the bottom tray, paper can be loaded via a slide at the top. And the machine features two-sided printing.
The 530 offers several alternative FAX configerations. I have a fairly complicated home phone system but was able to configure the FAX machine so as not to interfere with my phone calls and answering machine.
Photo quality is acceptable, comparable to the Canon S900 photo printer I used previously. I had planned to keep my S900 but, after seeing the 530 prints, I may just use the 530 for everything. The 530 does not have a card reader, but has a USB port on the front for a camera connection.
Finally, I've had no trouble sharing the printer among multiple computers via a mixed Apple Airport and 2Wire WIFI network. Just make sure you have the latest drivers and firmware for each device.
Overall, the MP530 has impressed me as a very capable and stylish mid-range multifunction machine.
Customer Review: Great multi-functional work horse for a home office
Summary: 5 Stars
This multi-fucntional printer works great. Print, scan, fax, copy for normal office needs all work as well as the large Xerox multi-fuctional machines at the office and you all know all well those machine works. The document feeder works good for letter size paper, but smaller size paper tends to occasionally cause problems if the paper guides are not set correctly. Also copying large legal size paper sometime causes problems, the machine sometime cuts off the image at letter size. But overall for a personal office use, it's excellent!!
Color document output is outstanding, colors are uniform and well saturated even on plain paper. Output on plain paper rivals most color laser printers, with no noticeable bleeding or banding.
I am a pretty serious photography guy, I have encountered some slight problems with color photo output. There're at least 5 color profiles that came with the printer driver but none of these have very well documented instruction on how and when to use each. So color matching a color photo is a guess and choose type of exercise. I found one of the color profile is good for color saturation but tend to be warm, while one of the other is more accurate on the color but have high dependency on the white intensity of the glossy paper used. However, for casual users, none of these would matter significantly for family photos once an appropriate profile is chosen (this takes a bit testing) or the default windows color matching is used. Canon should provide better instruction on what color match profile to use under what conditions. Again this is mostly for careful color matching concerns, considering this is a home office printer, the color photo output is outstanding to say the least. Once the correct color matching procedure is found, the output colors are very accurate. Printing speed on the glossy photo paper is rather slow.
A MAJOR advantage is the individual ink tank design, which are normally only available in professional ink jet printers from other manufacturers. Consumable waste is minimized in such an arrangement, which makes good economic sense for a home office.
Customer Review: Not perfect, but the best I've owned.
Summary: 5 Stars
I've had my Pixma for about a year. It has not been a carefree year, but pretty close.
Let me start out by saying that the support Canon provides is EXCELLENT. I get emails returned within hours of sending them.
Here are some things I like about the MP530:
* It's very easy to use. There are a minimum number of button pushes to do even complex stuff, like FAX settings. The menus are intuitive. The manual is clearly written
* Color on glossy paper is photo-quality. If you print color on standard paper, you need to set the quality to highest or you will get some lines.
* You can over-ride the ink-tank empty message. Non-Canon ink works fine if you can get the ink safely into the tanks (see below). You can buy non-chipped generic tanks and just move the little chip over from the Cannon tank.
* You can send FAXs from other networked computers (kewl!).
Stuff that's a pain:
* Ink. In order to fill the Canon tanks, you have to use a special tool the ink company will send you to remove a little plastic ball which is on the top of the tank under the label. It's doable and actually not difficult ONCE you get the hang of it. Once it is out you pray the rubber stopper seals properly or the tank will leak. If the stopper holds, which 4 out of five of mine did, you're golden from then on. This whole process is not for the faint-of-heart. Another option is to buy either chipped or non-chipped tanks. Non-chipped tanks (half the cost) require a chip transplant which is not hard to do. Occasional (maybe once a month) error messages saying your tanks may be empty. Not a big deal. Of course you could make Canon happy by simply buying their ink, but what fun is that?
* The scanner software is a bit clunky and stupid. I'm not sure what a serious scanning person would do. Buy alternative software? I don't mind it though.
Over-all a damn fine printer!!! It copies great, scans great, prints great and FAXs great.
Customer Review: Also a home office document scanner (pdf)
Summary: 5 Stars
There are many detailed reviews and descriptions so I will highlight just a few points.
1. Easy to set up in Windows XP - a couple minutes, no glitches. You must have a (not-included) USB cable with a "square" end.
2. You get fax-from-pc-document capability. For example, you have a Word or Powerpoint document on your pc. Basically when "printing" that document you choose the "Fax" among printer options in your regular print screen - dead simple, it prompts for phone #.
3. For us. a key factor was to replace our old one-sheet flatbed scanner with a multi-sheet scanner for home office use. Your multiple sheet paper document is converted to a PDF. (E.g. convert tax documents to "paperless office".) Great! The MP530 direct PDF is, however, an "image" type PDF and not word searchable. (Optical reader software is bundled, but not "inside" the PDF maker, it is a different program.) If you want to convert a paper document to a one-file, searchable PDF, you need special software like Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat can convert a PDF image document (direct from MP530) to a somewhat larger PDF with a hidden "vocabulary" of all words, making it searchable in the future even in free Adobe Reader. Of course, Acrobat software costs multiples of the MP530's price, so you wouldn't expect it to be included. (Check for academic versions if you have kids or are in school yourself.) You can get different machines, about triple the cost, that are home office "document scanners" but for light use we think the MP530 will accomplish this service fine.
4. Overall, no glitches in our first week. Other reviews report the MP530 ink cost-per-page is fairly low compared to various brands of all-in-one printers. Newer all-in-ones have features like little color video screens and slots for camera memory chips, those were not "must haves" for us.
Customer Review: Couldn't be happier with the Pixma MP530
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the third printer I've owned after an HP and an Epson. Of course we expect printers and other technology to improve over the years but this is the first one that really just did what I wanted it to do and it does it all without fuss.
I run Windows XP and I've had no trouble whatsoever getting it to work smoothly in that environment. No conflicts, no errors, no wasted time, no consultation of manuals and no tech support necessary.
I've been doing a lot of printing since I got this, and a lot of that printing has been for artwork that is mostly black background with images in white. That means an awful lot of black ink. I expected to get 13-15 copies of this artwork before I had to change cartridges, based on my experiences with HP and Epson. I'm up to about 80 copies of this black-heavy image and still haven't had to change. In the meantime I've printed hundreds of miscellaneous pages of mostly black print, but with a fair amount of color as well, and I'm just running low on the magenta cartridge and still haven't had to change any of them. I'm absolutely thrilled with this performance.
The print quality is wonderful, and better than I expected, even from a new printer.
I do a lot of scanning and onscreen editing (cropping, drawing, messing with the color, etc). The software is easy to use and fairly intuitive.
When I bought the printer, I didn't know it could print on both sides of the paper, but when I happened to think that that would be a good thing for a long document I had, I figured out how to do it in a couple of minutes, and it did a perfect job without babysitting.
I understand this model is being discontinued for a newer one, but when it's time to buy a new printer in a few years, I seriously doubt I won't get a Canon.