A solid home office printer

There are printers and then there are printers. We are all familiar with the little cube shaped laser printers that spit out a few bake sale flyers or a school book report that are designed to be placed on a shelf near your home desk. Then there are behemoths like Canon ImageClass MF743Cdw, a printer that oscillates squarely between the average home laser printer and the massive office all-in-one.

While this printer doesn’t assemble and staple your projects, it will do almost everything else. It has a built-in scanner: just lift the cover, drop your page down, and use the built-in LCD screen to send the file to a mobile device, PC, or, if you’re in 1996, a fax machine —And a pair of paper trays, one for odd sizes and one for Letter / Legal sizes.

This guy is tall. It’s a heavy 64 pounds and 43 inches tall with a 21 x 29 inch footprint. It takes up a lot of space. Be aware of this before devoting a place to it on your desk.

The printer outputs full color duplex or black and white and supports wifi and Ethernet connectivity. You can also connect it to a computer via USB. A generous 5 inch screen allows you to choose various functions and settings and you can also use the built-in NFC function to connect the phones to the printer with just one click. There is also a USB port on the front of the device for quick printing of documents and photos.

The speed was above average in my testing with about three seconds per black and white print, seven seconds for color prints. The latter number which was definitely affected by a system in which the printer spit out three color pages at a time, then warmed up the color toner for the next three pages. Canon estimates about 3000 prints from the included black toner cartridge and about 2000 for the color cartridge, although your mileage may vary.

As a standard printer, it works perfectly. This is one of the few printers I’ve tested recently that connects seamlessly to my home network and was available for all devices in the house, including phones and laptops. It was surprisingly refreshing, as I got really frustrated trying to connect various printers to my local network. The MF743 found my network and stayed constantly connected.

The speed, as mentioned above, is about average, and I was able to make fairly large prints – 50 pages or more – in a matter of minutes.

The device screen is large enough to access basic printer functionality. The setup is best done in the remote administration system which essentially turns the printer into a web server, which then allows you to enter address book entries for e-mails and faxes from the scanner, update update user profiles and change settings. Unless you’re tasked with setting this printer up for a small office, you’ll be able to use it right out of the box, and you can easily skip the most complex settings.

Canon does not recommend photo paper in this printer, so I tested all of these prints on regular letter size printer paper. The black and white reproduction was perfect, and you won’t find any flaws in this template for text documents. The color test prints were surprisingly bright and clear and I found the color accuracy to be acceptable. Again, this is not a photo printer, but photos sent directly from an iPhone to the printer are crisp and clear.

The copy function was a bit disappointing. I placed a printout of a color test page that I had printed earlier and resubmitted it in the copier. The result, as you can see, is quite irregular. Each color had an orange tint and there were many artifacts caused by the light shining through the print. I also tested the ID copier on a standard driver’s license and a few other cards. The copied results were poor but readable and, if you’re not picky, usable for record keeping. The printer scans at 600 DPI, which should have been more than enough, but it looks like the built-in scan and print system isn’t performing as well as it could.

Digitization was a whole different story. Scanned images output beautifully to the computer, and Canon includes the MF Scan Utility for scanning in Windows or macOS. Because it’s connected to the network, you can run the scan from anywhere and the results are stellar. In fact, scanning and printing from a computer may be the only viable method of copying color documents using this printer.

But look: the best place for this printer is in a small office. That’s too much firepower for home use – the paper tray can hold 300 sheets, which is way more than even a family with kids needs. If, for example, you are scanning documents in a doctor’s office or other professional situation, this is the perfect printer. Because it costs $ 400, with black-and-white and color toner replacements coming in at just under $ 100 each, you’d be spending less than you would for a more powerful copier / printer combo, and that does almost everything. you need. a small office. Scanning IDs and passports are nice additions (as long as you’re scanning and not copying) and the fax feature is, as they say, the icing on the Pudding Pop of the 1990s.

There are some features that stand-alone devices could probably improve upon. If, for example, you purchased it for the ID scanner and plan to print IDs immediately, a separate ID scanner may be the best solution. Or, if you plan to copy a lot of color documents and images, there are limitations set on this printer. But if you’re good to transfer scans to your computer and then store or print them as needed, you’re definitely in good hands.

Canon makes great photo printers. It is not one of those. It is a rugged workhorse of a printer intended for small to medium-sized offices. Print quality is fast, economical, and solid, and is a definite upgrade to other MFPs I’ve seen in this price range.

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• High printing speed.
• Robust and stylish paper tray.
• Color copies are not great.
• Perfect for a small office.