Canon Pixma MX7600 review

Performance
The MX7600 printed pages faster than its fellow Pixma, the MX700, in most of our tests. The MX7600 also leapt ahead of the Kodak EasyShare 5500 in all subject tests except for the photo test, which are within fractions of a page of each other anyway, so the difference is insignificant.

We tested it against one of our current favorite all-in-one printers, the HP Officejet L7780 and even though the Canon was beaten by three pages per minute in the text printing test, the MX7600 fought admirably in the rest of the tests and actually scanned pages faster than the L7780. Overall, Canon has made leaps and bounds over previous models in terms of speed, doubling its pages per minute count in half of our speed tests.

Speed test (in pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Text

Graphics

Photo

Grayscale scan

Copy

Kodak EasyShare 5500

4.25

2.48

1.55

5.01

1.7

HP Officejet L7780

10.22

5.45

1.82

3.93

6.6

Canon Pixma MX700

7.41

2.08

1.11

5.03

3.93

Canon Pixma MX7600

7.1

4.29

1.23

5.11

5.88

The quality of prints has also improved as well, thanks to Canon's new Pigment Reaction inkjet technology. The MX7600 has six ink tanks, five Lucia pigment inks and one cartridge of clear ink. Canon's Pigment Reaction works by laying down a coat of the clear ink first and bonding it with the colour pigments to create better quality graphics on plain paper. We found the text quality to be well formed with no jagged edges or misplaced ink dots.

While some other multifunction inkjets produce photos with fuzzy edges and dull colours, the MX7600 graphics are bright and sharp. The graphics we printed seemed to pop off the page with smooth gradients and an overall even amount of colour saturation.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday