Canon PIXMA MP760

Working with film or with a digital camera, the Canon PIXMA MP760 is a great multifunction unit for printing photos. It includes a film holder and a light in the lid for scanning slides and negatives. The MP760's flash memory card slots can read most memory formats (other than xD-Picture Cards), and images transfer swiftly to a PC through the USB 2.0 port. Alternatively, one can connect a PictBridge-compatible camera to the MP760's direct-print port.

The clearly laid-out control panel has a 2.5" colour LCD for previewing images and performing basic editing tasks. One can select images to print by marking and scanning an index print.

Because this model lacks an automatic document feeder, it's not ideal for certain office tasks such as copying large documents. There's no fax in the unit either, but the software package helps in sending scanned pages through a PC's fax modem.

The MP760's built-in duplexer, which saves paper by enabling two-sided printing, waits about 15 seconds for the first side to dry before printing on the reverse. The cassette in the base can hold 150 sheets of plain paper. The feeder at the rear has a 150-sheet capacity as well.

The MP760 uses five individual ink cartridges, holding three primary colours and two black inks. One of the black inks is a dye-based ink for photos, and the other a pigment-based ink for printing text.

The attractive, vividly-coloured photos that the MP760 printed on photo paper impressed us as much as did those printed by models using more ink colours. When using the black pigment ink, this model produced strong dark text, though the edges of some letters looked a little fuzzy. Colour graphics printed on plain paper looked less attractive: the pigment black ink created a posterised effect in some areas.

Scans of line art and copies of a text document delivered excellent results in our tests. Scans of text and photos also looked good. Scanned negatives looked sharp and showed details in highlights and shadows.

During our tests, the MP760 printed both text and colour graphics quickly, at 6.7ppm and 2.5ppm respectively, and it had a very fast copy speed, at 4.1ppm. It was slightly faster than average when scanning a 4" x 5" photo at 100 dpi, completing the job in 20 seconds.