Canon Pixma MX7600 review

The Canon Pixma MX7600 is fast and extremely capable multifunction colour inkjet printer with some interesting features.

Despite rumours of its demise, traditional inkjet printing technology continues to flourish. After all, even with the considerable advances in laser technology, if you want the most glorious shades and tints then a good inkjet is still your best bet. And, with the Canon Pixma MX7600, Canon has shown that there's plenty of gold still to be mined from this apparently outdated technology.

The Canon Pixma MX7600's biggest innovation (as a multifunctional printer that's already pretty high on polished features) is its Pigment Reaction (PgR) technology.

Previously, for the best inkjet printer results you've had to pay through the nose for glossy paper. But what PgR does is to coat ordinary printer paper with clear ink. This in effect turns plain into coated paper. And while the images still aren't quite as vibrant as they will be if you use glossy paper, the Canon Pixma MX7600's results are very impressive.

You get a number of other advantages with this ink, too. For a start, print speed is very good. Even at the Canon Pixma MX7600's highest quality mode, A4 images on plain paper could be generated at the rate of 3.5 pages per minute (ppm). Drop down to the lowest mode, and you can achieve very pleasing prints at a rate of more than 6ppm.

The Canon Pixma MX7600 is adept at handling text, with performance figures ranging from 10.5ppm in draft mode to, at the highest quality setting, a still pretty solid 2ppm. Text output in the middle mode is available at a fast 8.1ppm, and the resulting output here is both clean (especially for an inkjet) and dark.

Duplexing facilities are provided through the Canon Pixma MX7600's 35-page Auto Document Feeder, and the ability to print bold colours means you have an alternative to the paper-jam-fests that result when trying to print to both sides of a piece of card or glossy paper.

Add to that the supposedly enhanced durability of these inks (not something we were able to test), and this makes the Canon Pixma MX7600 a pretty impressive piece of kit.

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