Canon Pixma MX892 Review: Nice Paper Handling, Good Speed, So-So Costs

03.05.2012
Canon’s Pixma MX892 Wireless Inkjet Office All-In-One (for printing, copying, faxing, and scanning) is suitable for a home or very small office. It delivered good output quality in our tests, and supports both automatic duplex printing and scanning, for a reasonable $200 (as of April 27, 2012). It's also handsome, solidly built, and moderately fast. Among its shortcomings are an awkward control panel and an absence of high-yield replacement ink cartridges, which other office-minded models in the same price range make available.

Setting up the PixmaMX892 is easy; and the MFP supports USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi connectivity. You can set up Wi-Fi via WPS, though the 3-inch LCD gives you the option of selecting a network and entering a password to accomplish the same setup. Canon bundles its Solution Menu EX software, a capable package that handles everything from photo albums to scanning. You may push-scan to your computer from the PixmaMX892's control panel or offload scans via USB/PictBridge, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, or Compact Flash media. You may also print directly from media inserted into these ports.

The Pixma MX892's paper-handling features are very good. In addition to a 150-sheet main tray, it has a rear vertical feed that can hold 150 more sheets. Canon also includes an automatic duplexer, and a 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for the scanner. The ADF scans duplex, so you don't have to double-feed two-sided documents by hand. The flatbed scanner is letter-/A4-size, and the lid telescopes to accommodate thicker material.

The Pixma MX892's control panel features a grid of black buttons that, depending on how you use the unit, light up as the okay and cursor keys, or as a numeric keypad. Three function buttons act as shortcuts, sometimes; at other times, you have to use the okay and cursor keys.

The Pixma MX892's performance is quite good. It prints monochrome pages at a sprightly 8.1 pages per minute from the PC, and at 8.3 ppm from the Mac. Snapshot-size (4-by-6-inch) photos print at about 3.2 ppm on plain paper, and 1.9 ppm on glossy photo paper. Full-page photos, printed on the Mac, exit in just under two minutes. Scan and copy speeds are adequate.

The Pixma MX892 uses a five-tank ink system consisting of black, cyan, magenta, yellow, and photo black. The $16 black lasts for an estimated 339 pages, yielding a cost estimate of 4.7 cents per page. Each color cartridge costs $14. The cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges last for anywhere from 486 to 555 pages, and a page with all four colors an estimated cost of around 13 cents. The photo black should last for 666 4-by-6-inch photos, per Canon’s proprietary tests (or contributes a minuscule amount to regular documents). To the Pixma MX892’s credit, these ink costs are cheaper than average for standard-size cartridges.