Bottom Line
The Canon Pixma MX892 Wireless Inkjet
Office All-in-One combines an attractive design with features for both
home and office use, and prints great photos.
he Canon Pixma MX892 Wireless Inkjet Office All-in-One ($199.99 direct)
is essentially the same printer as the Editors’ Choice Canon Pixma MX882
Wireless Inkjet Office All-in-One ($199.99 direct, 4.5 stars), which I
reviewed in early 2011, with some added cloud-based printing abilities.
This multifunction printer (MFP)
has a very solid feature set, starting with its nifty dual-function
front panel—its backlit buttons change depending on what function you’re
using. The MX892 (Best Deal: $199.99 at Amazon) is a good fit for a home office, particularly if it does shared duty as a household printer, as it prints magnificent photos.
The MX892 prints, copies, scans, and faxes. You can scan to
email—it’ll open up your email client and attach a scan to a new
message—and send fax either from your PC or the printer’s keypad. It’s a
handsome device, glossy black with rounded corners and a beveled,
matte-black top, though a little bulky for a home-office inkjet at 8.6
by 19.4 by 17.7 inches (HWD) and 25 pounds.
To the right of the 3-inch color LCD screen is a 4-by-4 grid of
fairly large buttons. When the machine is idle the grid is dark, but
when you press the Copy, Scan, or Card button to the left of the screen,
the backlit buttons light up so a 4-way controller (arrows pointing up,
down, left, and right, with an OK button in the middle) appears within
the grid. When you press the Fax button, though, the controller is
replaced by an alphanumeric keypad.
To the right of the output tray is a port for a USB
key or PictBridge-enabled camera. Behind a protective door are slots
for a variety of memory-key formats, even the increasingly scarce
CompactFlash.
The MX892 has ample paper capacity, between a 150-sheet main cassette
and a 150-sheet top feeder. It has an automatic duplexer for printing
on both sides of a sheet of paper. It also has a 35-sheet duplexing
automatic document feeder (ADF) for easy scanning, copying, or faxing of
two-sided documents. For printing, the MX892 uses 5 ink tanks,
including both dye-based and pigment-based black.
The MX892 supports printing from Apple mobile devices through
AirPrint Another new feature is support for Pixma Cloud Link, which lets
you download and print office templates like stationary, check lists,
calendars, memos, envelopes and more right to the MFP, without a
computer. It also lets you print photos from the online photo album
sections of Canon image Gateway and Google Picasa.
The Canon Pixma MX892 offers Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and USB connectivity. I
tested it over an Ethernet connection with its driver installed on a PC
running Windows Vista
.
Speed and Output Quality
Last year when I reviewed the MX882 (Best Deal: $204.00 at Amazon Marketplace),
I noted that its speed was typical of inkjets in its price range. The
MX892 printed out the latest version of our business applications suite
(as timed by QualityLogic’s hardware and software) at a speed of 2.8
effective pages per minute (ppm), essentially the same as the MX882 (2.9
ppm). However, the competition hasn’t stood still. The HP Officejet Pro
8600 e-All-in-One ($199 direct, 4 stars) printed out the same tests
at 5.7 ppm, while the Editors’ Choice HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus
e-All-in-One ($299 direct, 4 stars), was timed at a blistering 5.9 ppm.
The Epson WorkForce WF-845
($199 direct, 4 stars) turned in a more mortal 4.2 ppm, which is still
50% faster than the MX892. The MX892 averaged 59 seconds seconds to
print out a 4-by-6 photo, a typical speed for an inkjet MFP.
The MX892’s overall output quality was slightly above par, with
superior photos and graphics quality typical of an inkjet. Text quality
was par for an inkjet MFP. The text is fine for general business use,
though I’d hesitate to use it for documents like resumes that are
intended to convey an appearance of professionalism.
Photo quality was above average for an inkjet, with the best prints
rivaling what you’d get from a professional photo lab. A monochrome
photo showed a trace of a tint, but that was the only issue worth
mention.
Graphics quality was on a par with the vast majority of MFPs we test.
Though colors generally looked realistic, some graphics had a slightly
mottled or faded look due to uneven distribution of ink. Many printers
have trouble printing out very thin colored lines against a black
background in one illustration; with the MX892, the lines were totally
invisible. There was also mild banding— a faint pattern of evenly
spaced, thin lines about a quarter inch apart—on several graphics. Most
graphics showed traces of dithering (graininess).
Other Issues
Canon’s claimed running costs for the MX892 are a relatively high 5.2
cents per monochrome page and 13.4 cents per color page. The HP
Officejet Pro 8600 (Best Deal: $179.90 at PCNation) has
claimed costs of 1.6 cents per black-and-white page and 7.2 cents per
color page, as does the Editors’ Choice HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus. Your
savings for monochrome printing for either of these HP printers over
the MX892 are about $36 per 1,000 pages and about twice that for color.
After about 2,700 black-and white pages, you’d have already made up in
ink savings the $100 difference in price between the HP Pro 8600 Plus
and the MX892
The Canon Pixma MX892 offers an impressive feature set, and solid
output including superior photo quality, at a good price. The addition
of AirPrint and Pixma Cloud Link are nice touches, but essentially the
MFP is the same beast as the MX882. Their business printing speeds are
nearly identical, but in the past year we’ve seen other inkjets such as
the HP Officejet 8600 series get substantially faster.
The HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-All-in-One printed out our business test
suite in less than half the time as the MX892. Although they have the
same sticker price, the Pro 8600 offers substantially lower running
costs. The Editors’ Choice HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus e-All-in-One is
even faster than the Pro 8600. It costs $100 more than the MX892, but
with the HP’s lower running costs, it would make up the price difference
in half a year or less, assuming a print volume of 100 pages a week.
More Multi-function Printer Reviews:
• HP Officejet 6700 Premium e-All-in-One
• Canon Pixma MX892 Wireless Inkjet Office All-in-One
• Ricoh Aficio SP C242SF
• Ricoh Aficio SP C240SF
• Lexmark OfficeEdge Pro5500 Color MFP
