Printers

Versatile all-in-one printer gets even better

The Canon MB5470 produced excellent printouts, with sharp crisp text and good-looking images, during tests.
The Canon MB5470 produced excellent printouts, with sharp crisp text and good-looking images, during tests. PHOTO: CANON

The Canon Maxify MB5470 improves slightly on last year's MB5370. Canon's top office inkjet all-in-one printer is now a bit faster at printing documents.

Maximum print speeds (achieved using the draft mode) have gone up from 24 colour pages to 26.5 pages per minute. It also takes just 7sec to produce the first page of a document in colour, compared with 9sec previously. For black-and-white pages, this figure is now 7sec instead of 8sec.

Using a different set of test documents from the ones used by Canon, I found that the MB5470 took 8sec to print the first black-and- white page. The print speed (at standard quality) was around 15 pages per minute for a black-and- white document.

This is decent, though the HP OfficeJet Pro 8720 managed 20 black-and-white pages per minute in the same test.

The MB5470 produced excellent printouts, with sharp crisp text and good-looking images.

  • TECH SPECS

  • PRICE: $459

    YIELD: Up to 2,500 standard pages per XL cartridge (black) and 1,500 pages per XL cartridge (colour)

    PRINT RESOLUTION: Up to 600 x 1,200 dots per inch

    SPEED: Up to 32.5 pages per minute (black), 26.5 pages per minute (colour)

  • RATING

  • FEATURES: 4/5

    DESIGN: 3/5

    PERFORMANCE: 4/5

    VALUE FOR MONEY: 3/5

    OVERALL: 4/5

Other minor upgrades include a larger touchscreen, from 3 inches to 3.5 inches. The touchscreen is also now flush with the sides, and not sunken in. This helps when you are trying to swipe the screen to the next page.

Canon has improved the user interface, such as placing frequently used commands on the Home screen and adding scroll buttons at the side to make it easier to get to the top or the end of a list.

There is still room for improvement, though. For instance, one of the features touted by Canon - ID Card Copy, which scans both sides of your ID card and prints them on a single page - is buried under three layers of submenus.

In contrast, the same function is practically the first item on the Home screen of the HP OfficeJet Pro 8720.

The good news is that you can save the ID Card Copy function, as well as any other specific instructions, as a custom profile. From the Home screen, you can click on the Custom profiles button to see a list of your custom profiles, which saves you valuable time.

Businesses may also find the ability to restrict certain functions, such as scanning to a USB storage device, useful in some scenarios.

The MB5470 has two paper cassette trays, each able to fit 250 sheets. They protrude slightly from the printer's main chassis when in use.

Canon says that having two trays improves print speed as the printer can pull in a second sheet of paper from the other tray as it is printing. You can also have different types of paper in each tray.

One thing I found rather tedious: each time I pull out either of the paper trays to load paper, the printer asks me to register the type of paper that I have loaded. I wish Canon could let me set the trays to A4 size unless otherwise specified.

Like all modern printers, Canon has a print app (for Android and iOS) that lets you send documents and photos to the MB5470 from a mobile device. You can even link cloud services to this app, though you'll need to register a cloud printing account with Canon.

• Verdict: Businesses and small home office users will appreciate the speed, print quality and all-in-one capabilities of the Maxify MB5470.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on December 21, 2016, with the headline Versatile all-in-one printer gets even better. Subscribe