Canon Pixma MP970 – Not the Conventional Canon

Pros

The Canon Pixma MP970 is a network ready printer with auto duplexer; user friendly control panel, huge LCD and well thought out menus, PictBridge port and memory card slots.

Cons

The Canon Pixma MP970’s printing task speeds is comparatively slower than previous generation printers, the print/scan quality also is not as expected from Canon and the printer needs improvement on the whole. One another problem that we found was that the USB port of the printer doesn’t support flash drives or hard drives.

Introduction

The Canon Pixma MP970 is a refurbishment to 2006’s Canon Pixma MP960. But unfortunately this isn’t the improvement that we were expecting and as its precursor was a top-quality photo-oriented multifunction printer. On the contrary the Canon Pixma MP970 is a slower printer, which hardly matches the standards set by Canon, at least for print quality. But then there also is something that we liked is that the Canon Pixma MP970 is priced at $300, which clearly is $100 less than Canon’s MP960 and despite the low price the printer comes with Ethernet networking standard. But apart from this the feature set for both the printer is almost the same.

Apart from quality and performance related issues, there has not been any significant improvements. Though we would appreciate Canon taking some steps for improving the committed image editing option and including supporting for flash drives and USB hard drives using USB port positioned right at from. This is because most of the manufacturers in the market have done it and there is no reason why Canon can’t. In general, the Canon Pixma MP960 came as a disappointment for us but if you don’t need Network support then you can go with this printer, but if you want a photo-oriented networked multifunction printer then we’ll recommend the HP Photosmart C6180, though it is a tad slower than MP970.

Design

The Canon Pixma MP970 clearly is not a printer that can easily get onto your desk and measuring 15.6 inches deep, 8.4 inches tall and 18.5 inches wide, the MP970 clearly is going to take plenty of space on your desk. Also, weighing over 26 pounds the printer will not be easy to move around and hence place it accordingly at your home or at your office. The overall body of the printer is silver with black highlights. Positioned behind a door are a PictBridge USB port and two memory card slots residing underneath the slots.

The control panel of Pixma MP960 is pretty much similar to last year’s model except for minor changes here and there. The control panel again is entrenched into the scanner lid, which is hidden under the fold-up panel. Set in on the bottom of the panel is a huge 3.5 inch LCD screen. Just as the MP960, the Pixma MP970 also has a rather simple control panel as the most of the functionality of the printer is taken care by the onscreen menu.

All the menu options are arranged in a circular pattern, which rotates around the screen as soon as the scroll wheel is turned on the control panel. The four direction keys of the camera are also set ring around the wheels, so as to let you used it instead of the wheel and located at the middle of the wheel is an OK button. Other switches on the control panel includes a Home key, a feed switch, a Navigation button which also serves as a shortcut for tutorials on several advanced features, two soft keys and two start buttons which easily changes function by menu.

The Canon Pixma MP970 has got two sources for paper input: a cassette and a back input tray. Both the sources can store about 150 sheets of plain paper. The rear input tray is recommended for special media or photo paper, because these papers can easily cause jam when they are forced against a roller. The front panel of the printer folds out and serves as an output tray.

System Configuration

Price: $306.99
Manufacturer: Canon USA
Part Number: 2181B002
Printer Type: Ink-jet Color Photo printer
Operating System Supported: Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP, Apple Mac OS X 10.2.8 – 10.4.x and Microsoft Windows Vista
Copier Type: Digital
Dimensions (W x D x H): 18.6 x 15.6 x 8.4 inches

System weight: 26.5 lbs
Features: Print from memory card,
PC Connection: Hi-Speed USB, IrDA
Software Included: Drivers & utilities
Direct Printing Specifications: PictBridge and Canon Direct Print
Supported Media Type: Envelopes, Cards, Plain paper and Photo paper
Supported Flash Memory: CompactFlash, SmartMedia, IBM Microdrive, Memory Stick, SD Memory Card, MultiMediaCard and Memory Stick Pro
Service & Support Details: One year limited warranty and Technical support for Phone consulting

Performance

The biggest disappointment concerning Canon Pixma MP970 came when we saw that the printer despite being an improved variant of MP960 is not as good as its precursor in terms of print quality and speed both. The Pixma MP970 printed text at a sluggish speed of 7.85 pages per minute, which is complete 1.5 pages per minute slower than Pixma MP960, which printed 9.42 text pages per minute. The performance got even worse for color graphics printing and it printed around 2.07 pages per minute, though it was very little slower than Pixma MP960, but was more than half a page slower than HP Photosmart C6180 and Kodak EasyShare 5500. So the performance actually isn’t the forte of Pixma MP970 and there actually isn’t much to cheer about here.  Even the print quality for different media types was not acceptable.

Support

The Canon Pixma MX970 comes with standard one year warranty. The telephonic support is available on weekdays from 8 a.m. to midnight PT, while on Saturdays it’s available from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The E-mail support also is available 24*7 through a Web-based form. The online support website offers downloadable software, drivers, FAQs and manuals.

Word from the Experts

The Canon Pixma MP970 definitely lagging way behind the standards set by Canon. Its better you go for yesteryear’s comparatively expensive MP960 rather than Canon MP960.