Saturday, September 14, 2013
Canon Copier ImageClass MF6550
I bought mine online and was relieved to see that it was well packaged. There was enough material in their to get it to me safely even when using the postal service. Setting it up was easy. Unpack it, insert the toner, add some paper to the tray and plug it in. You can use it as a standalone or connect it to a PC or network. I used the USB method and connected it to my PC. There are only two of us and the PCs are already networked so I didn’t want to mess with that.
The copying and printing is a real joy. Simple and effective to set up and a joy to behold once the finished article arrives. I use the MF6550 a lot for printing marketing manuals for staff, which include graphs or images and this printer will render perfectly accurate hard copies until it either runs out of paper or toner. It will happily do the same for copying too.
Talking of toners, it ships with the usual half toner which I stretched to around 1000 sheets. Replacements are available from Quickshiptoner.com for $49 and will cover 5000. It only takes a couple of minutes to change over. The Canon toners are all in one, meaning there is no separate drum or anything to change. Not only does this make maintenance easier, it also saves you having to buy a separate drum.
The copier does what most copiers do, resize, produce multiple copies and utilize the automatic document feeder. There are options on the MF6550 that I have only seen on more expensive machines, like automatic paper sizing, frame erasing, automatic duplex printing, scanning to pdf and other useful things.
The fax takes a little setting up, it doesn’t just work out of the box, but Canon kindly dedicated 39 pages of the user manual to it, which gets it running eventually.
The MF6550 is a good home office device. It does everything you would expect, and most things better. The software is good, the user manual understandable by a normal person and is hasn’t broken down yet.
