I have a long office bench, crammed to the edges with an A3 printer, 35mm film scanner and a flatbed film and document scanner. All of these I’ve bought over a number of years and well before the era of the single unit, multi purpose devices that can scan, print, copy and fax their little heads off.

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The PIXMA MG8150 is a printer, a flatbed scanner and stand-alone copier. It does it all.

Canon Pixma MG8150 Features

It can connect with a computer by USB link, or via a wireless link, infra red or via a Bluetooth connection with an iPhone, iPod or similar. The front slot also accepts a range of memory cards (Memory Stick; Memory Stick Duo/PRO Duo/PRO/Micro; SD/SDHC/miniSD/miniSDHC/microSD/microSDHC; MMC/MMC Plus/RS-MMC/MMCmobile; CF; Microdrive; xD-Picture Card).There’s even a slot for a USB stick, to read from or write to (in the case of a scan).

All of which makes it an ideal, central machine for office or home.

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The print resolution is 9600x2400dpi combined with a dot minimum size of 1picolitre. There are six individual ink tanks: cyan, magenta, yellow, black, grey and pigmented black.

The MG8150 makes borderless prints up to A4, and is ideally suited also to making snapshot 10x15cm prints. It will also print CD/DVDs. There are two paper loading trays, one at the rear and the other under the printer.

The scanner: useful for scanning documents, artwork and photographs up to A4 in size, it can also handle 35mm film — six frames in a strip or four mounted 35mm slides. Resolution: 4800 x 9600 dpi.

It’s a big, black beast, eating up a fair amount of desk space and weighing ten kilos. The user interface is unusual and somewhat radical. It’s only when you power up that you see how the operational access points light up as you move through each task … it’s a little alarming at first, but you soon get used to it. On top of the printer is a large 9cm vari-angle LCD screen that helps with task selection and image correction before printing.

And a nice add-on: you can print individual frames from a High Definition video.

Then you can join an exclusive club with Canon’s Creative Park. Log on as a Canon printer owner gives you access to a whole pile of projects you can produce with your MG8150: like 3D paper craft projects, scrapbooking templates, greeting cards, etc.

Printing Times

A4 print: 1m 40 seconds.

Copy and print an A4 page in B&W: three seconds.

10x15cm photo at full quality on gloss paper: 45 seconds.

Comment

The whole experience with the MG8150 was revolutionary: I liked the backlit touch screen operation and found it easy to get around and do the tasks I needed to perform. Oh and it’s quiet.

However, I figure Canon has made a major mistake with the instruction book. It totals 84 pages but they’re laid out in the most confusing way: the top of each page has a series of illustrations but beneath these are page-wide strips of descriptive text in each of the four languages, so you find yourself thumbing through four times as many pages as you need to for each task.

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Quality: I made my usual test prints and found that the printer performed as well, if not better, as any I have seen over the last few years. Gradations were smooth, colours accurate, with small text very clean and sharp. Colours were natural, not ‘popped’.

An excellent multi device, with some useful functions. One note: if you run out of an ink cartridge, the printer locks down, so all scan functions are inaccessible.

Canon Pixma MG8150 Specifications

Resolution: 9600×2400 dpi.
Ink Droplet (picolitres): 1/2/5 (C/M/GY); 5 (DyeBK/Y); 30 (PgBK).
Print Speed: Colour 9.3 inches/minute. B&W 12.5 ipm. Photo (4×6) 20 seconds.
Paper Weight: 64-300 gsm.
Scanner Type: Flatbed CCD.
Film Scan: Six 35mm frames; four 35mm slides.
Maximum Document Size: 216x297mm.
Display: 8.8cm LCD.
Wired LAN: IEEE 802.3u (100BASE-TX); EEE 802.310 (BASE-T).
Wireless LAN: IEEE 802.11n/IEEE 802.11g/IEEE 802.11b.
Interface: USB 2.0; Bluetooth v2.0; IrDA IR; Direct Print Port (PictBridge).
Operating Systems: Windows XP SP2 or later; Vista/Windows 7. Mac OSX 10.4.11 or later.
Dimensions: 470x199x392 WHDmm.
Weight: 10.7kg.

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