Canon Pixma MP600

Canon Pixma MP600

Pixma MP600 Review, by Paul Jasper December 20, 2006

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• Latest User Reviews 12 reviews
• Reviewed by: KNRover

  Duration of ownership: 12 Months

  Strengths: Excellent print quality, simple and accurate scanning and copying, dual-feed that allows you to print a letter from the top stack and the envelope from the bottom tray by pressing a single button.

  Weaknesses: Does not feed small (less than 8.5 x 11) pieces of paper well; often come thru cockeyed because of no guide on left side of tray. Ink cartridges don't last long and are relatively expensive. Although many have mentioned "size" as a weakness, it MUST be big in order to scan full 8.5 x 11 pages.

  Overall: Best printer and best scanner I've ever had. Would buy again in a minute.

• Reviewed by: Dynamyte

  Duration of ownership: 5 Months

  Strengths: Good combination unit for the price. Fast. Good job as copier for occasional jobs.

  Weaknesses: According to the manuals, this printer apparently is NOT for printing labels. I have used it for a few sheets and it has worked OK. However this deficiency should be promptly displayed for us who need a color printer for our home office. Had one color ink cartridge go bad which Canon replaced under warranty. Ink consumption seems high. Scanning and OCR software seems difficult to use and understand. Manual is terse and lots of questions aren't answered, such as loading multiple sheets into the sheet feeder or as a manual feed.

  Overall: OK machine. Will look for a different unit more suitable for home office work. the MP600 seems more for printing photos than business-like activities.

• Reviewed by: RGRotts

  Duration of ownership: 2 Months

  Strengths: Design quality - Ease of installation - Printing speed - Beautiful scanning capability - Dual paper trays are nice but avoid keeping the back one loaded all the time, thus avoiding exra dust and other stuff from falling inside.

  Weaknesses: Ink use and price are heavy weaknesses. If it weren;t for this I would have given my rating 4 stars or higher. The new CLI-8 series are more expensive than the last series so they hit you hard in the pocketbook after buying a new printer. Now, the old CLI-6 series has gone down in price since they aren't making any printers that use them any longer. Also, it claims to be a photo printer but it doesn't come close to matching a 6 color printer like the iP6700 in print quality. I think the stats prove that it's cheaper to send you printing out than to keep using one of these for inferior prints.

  Overall: Overall, this is as good as they get for the price these days. The price of ink seems to be a universal issue. Canon makes great products but when it comes to printers, their quality excels, but at the expense of the consumer. Take out a loan to cover ink costs. The best way around this is to default to draft quality printing unless absolutely necessary. If you can find a new or refurbished i960, it makes great photo prints and uses the reduced CLI-6 series ink.

• Reviewed by: jz34

  Duration of ownership: 3 Months

  Strengths: Overall, from my experience, pleased with both the way the printer functions and with the quality.

  Weaknesses: Incredibly expensive to use!!!!! Rather slow on scanning.

  Overall: Having only had the printer for 3 months, and not doing any particularly excessive printing, I have already had to replace ALL of the cartridges at least once, and the some of them (especially black) several times. I don't know if it is a problem with this particular printer or a general concern. The published information from PC World's reviewer indicates a much greater number of pages per ink cartridge than I've experienced and the cartridges are expensive. Almost tempted to replace printer just because of that. At this point, I've almost paid as much in ink as the printer cost -- again, in only 3 months of not particularly excessive use!

• Reviewed by: merl

  Duration of ownership: 6 Months

  Strengths: Very nice photos if it is compatible with your OS and you use the bundled software

  Weaknesses: Very expensive ink cartridge replacement. With what I consider to be minimal use (less than 150 photos and maybe 100 pages of text), I have already had to purchase and replace all five cartridges. No LINUX compatibility as far as photo printing. Bundled software must be used to ensure excellent quality photo printing

  Overall: This printer is not worth its price. Although it will print very nice photos if you use a Microsoft OS, I had to use the Easy Photo Print software under WIN XP in order to get photos to print borderless 4x6. I could not get photos to print correctly with Picasa my phot management tool of choice. This may not be a big deal to some, but I do not like being required to use bundled software. I read tons of reviews and not one mentioned this issue. Also, print cartridges tend to run out very fast compared to my HP printers and the replacements are very expensive.

• Reviewed by: wvextex

  Duration of ownership: 6 Months

  Strengths: Print quality, Duplex printing

  Weaknesses: Cost and local availability of ink

  Overall: I purchased my printer directly from Canon so pricing was not a deal. One of the black ink cartrages had a problem about a week after I started using it(each cartrage has an embedded micro chip) and would not print. Canon shipped a new one right away. I have only been able to find the cartrages in my area at Staples, and I think they are costly ( averaging almost $20 each for each of the 5 cartrages. While the unit is a little noisy the print quality (both text and photo) is very good. I consider it to be very user friendly for copying, scanning and printing.

• Reviewed by: lweihl

  Duration of ownership: 1 Month

  Strengths: Print quality is great. Copying feature works well.

  Weaknesses: Printing does not work on a Compaq Presario 6000 which has an Athlon XP chip

  Overall: I'm helping a friend try to get this working on an older Compaq Presario 6000 that has an Athlon XP chip. It will make copies without any problems but has all sorts of problems printing from the PC. I went so far as to put in a spare hard drive and use the system restore disks to put the machine back to the state it was in upon purchase then I installed only the Canon driver. The printer still does not work. It streaks lines and splits pages in various places but not where page breaks are. This printer worked perfectly on my older Dell Dimension 4100. Canon support was not of much help when I asked them to please verify that this printer will or will not work on this model computer. They ignored that part of my question and gave me troubleshooting hints, none of which worked, of course. I just wanted to add this review to warn others about possible complications.

• Reviewed by: PSBaird

  Duration of ownership: 1 Week

• Reviewed by: sills0608

  Duration of ownership: 2 Days

  Strengths: VERY SIMPLE TO SET UP OUT OF THE BOX AND DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE. ALSO LOVE THE EXTRA PAPER TRAY AND VERY EASY TO SWITCH FROM ONE TRAY TO THE OTHER. tHE BEST PART IS THE PHOTO PRINT QUALITY.

  Weaknesses: HAVE NOT FOUND ANY YET.

  Overall: I AM COMPLETELY IMPRESSED WITH THE CANON MP600. I STARTED OFF MY PRINTER ADVENTURE WITH PURCHASING THE HP C5180 SINCE MY PREVIOUS PRINTER WAS AN HP. I JUST ASSUMED THAT THIS WOULD BE A GOOD PRINTER AND IT HAD GOOD REVIEWS. ALSO THE SALES PEOPLE REALLY PUSHED THIS ONE TOO. WHEN I GOT IT HOME AND STARTED PRINTING CHRISTMAS PICTURES I WAS HORRIFIED BY THE PRINT QUALITY. I WENT BACK TO THE REVIEWS AND DECIDED TO LOOK INTO THE CANON MP600. UNFORTUNATELY THE SALES PEOPLE AT BEST BUY, CIRCUIT CITY AND COMPUSA COULD NOT DEMO ONE OF THE UNITS BECAUSE THEY DID NOT KNOW HOW TO USE THE CANON MP600. ONE OF THE SALESMEN EVEN TRIED TO CONVINCE ME THAT THE HP I GOT MUST HAVE BEEN DEFECTIVE.(CANON, PLEASE TRAIN THE PEOPLE BETTER THAT ARE SELLING YOUR PRODUCT. THEY ARE NOT DOING YOU ANY JUSTICE) I TOOK THE CHANCE AND PURCHASED THE MP600. I WAS EXCITED TO SET IT UP AND PRINT MY PICTURES. I FOUND IT VERY EASY TO SET UP AND I PRINTED THE EXACT SAME PICTURES THAT I HAD PRIINTED FROM THE HP C5180. I AM ABSOLUTELY THRILLED WITH THE PRINTS THAT CAME FROM MY NEW CANON MP600. THE PICTURE QUALITY WAS CRISP AND CLEAR. SKIN TONES WERE EXCELENT AND THE PRINT SPEED WAS EXCELLENT. IF YOU ARE LIKE ME AND WANT A PRINTER FOR SOME TEXT PRINTING, SOME SCANNING BUT PRIMARILY EXCELLENT QUALITY PHOTOS THEN I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS PRINTER. EVEN IF THEY TRY TO PUSH THE HP C5180 THE CANON MP600 IS HANDS DOWN THE BEST!

• Reviewed by: sdroth24

  Duration of ownership: 4 Months

  Strengths: 3rd Canon printer in 5 years and by far the best. Fast printing, great quality, very easy to use.

  Weaknesses: The large size would be the only draw back

  Overall: This is a great printer, The cartridges were hard to find at first. Office Depot sells the pack of 4 for 43.00. The lower print tray makes for very easy b/w printing.

• Reviewed by: at5172

  Duration of ownership: 3 Days

  Strengths: Easy set up. Logical menus and easy navigation. Two sided is a great addition that is more than just nice to have.

  Weaknesses: A weakness reported by others and I affirm is that skin tones are too red. I addressed this weakness by using the menus on the printer to add yellow. The yellow (+2) selection solves this problem. Check it out yourself with your photo in the store before purchase.

• Reviewed by: kflack

  Duration of ownership: 1 Day

  Strengths: Outstanding Printer

  Weaknesses: Only difficulty is that there are no 3rd party inkjet cartridges for this model at this time. When PC World does their evaluations they should take this into consideration, when determining the cost of printing. I routinely purchase compatible inkjet cartridges from www.metawatch.ca and save tons of money.

  Overall: Excellent, but expensive printing.

• Reviewed by: wesdxcvvv

  Strengths: nice printing when it prints.

  Weaknesses: expensive ink, paper jams

  Overall: Google "canon mp600 paper jam error" and see what you get. The only thing to do is throw it away and buy a new one.

• Reviewed by: gatorj

  Strengths: Excellent quality prints, seperate ink cartridges, good cartridge life.

  Weaknesses: A bit large, a bit noisy, defective cartridge

  Overall: The major function of this device is to print and it does so very well. It is a bit noisy, even on the quiet setting, and sounds a little cheap while it is printing. I found it very easy to assemble. I had a problem with one geniune Canon ink cartridge not being recognized. A quick call to Canon CS and a new one was shipped immediately. Apparently though there is a bit of an issue with the this printer and its #8 cartridges per the rep. One nice touch is that it comes with a separate black cartridge...larger and cheaper...for text printing. Scanning is fine, nothing extraordinary, but more than adequate for my needs. I haven't printed photographs on photo paper yet, just plain paper, but they were fine.

• Reviewed by: freeunities

  Strengths: Cost, speed, and print quality

  Weaknesses: Size

  Overall: I purchased this for my daughter who will be in a dorm room in the fall, figuring she could ill-afford the clutter of multiple machines. I've always avoided multi-purpose devices feeling that they required inevitable performance sacrifices, but that doesn't seem to be a big problem with the MP600. The print quality is better than any ink-jet I've previously owned; the photo printing is better than my Epson 785EPX; the scan and copy capabilities are not bad (not as good as my Perfection 4490). Set-up is a breeze, and the card reader, display, and photo print options are great

• Reviewed by: capsulenuke

  Strengths: Looks

  Weaknesses: Support and Service

  Overall: I had this product for 3 days and on the third it breaks. All it does is paper Jam and display error messages. I hate this thing. Its so big and sometimes its hard to see if you got the whole paper jam out. I got a midterm tomorrow and this thing doesn't work.. Please and I don't think the photo quality is that well. I don't know what else to buy but please don't get this machine thinking its a miracle at a low price..... This is really what you pay for....crap. Look at some other printers cause this one stinks....

• Reviewed by: triciawg

  Strengths: ease of use;2 paper feeders;copy,scan,print from pc;excellent photo quality

  Weaknesses: no fax

  Overall: I have owned an HP and then an AIO Epson. Both printers had frequent paper jams & other annoying quirks. The Epson was an upgrade from the HP to get better photo quality. It was a big disappointment. Now, I bought this Canon after much research on the web and with some trepidation. It is amazing!!! Fabulous photo quality (similar to Shutterfly). Easy to use. Paper feeds from both sources easily. I keep copy paper in one and photo paper in the other. The wheel works easily-- very user friendly. You can scan & reduce or enlarge copies quickly & simply. This printer is highly rated on the internet and they are RIGHT!!!