The C530 MP has everything you'll probably need for a home office: color and b/w printing, photocopying and a fax machine. The documentation and user manual are very well-written and the customer support service, once you can get a hold of speaking person, are friendly and knowledgeable, even if they can't solve your problem.

However, I have two gripes about this machine. The first problem seems to be endemic to all Canon printers. The second problem may only be this particular model.

First problem: it's noisy. I'm not just talking about the noise required to print out a piece of paper, but Canon printers (as opposed to HP printers, the only other brand that I'm familiar with) seem to require an unnecessary amount of printer head movements and paper take-ups before they even get started. If you send a job to the printer when it's idle, the print head has to zip, whirrr, bzzzzz, click-click-click back and forth for what seems like forever, before it starts printing.

Second problem: we've had unsolvable problems with the print drivers. About once ever one or two weeks, we get an error message that says the computer can't communicate with the printer and "maybe it's not plugged in" (thanks, Canon). After making sure that it is connected, tech support told me to re-install the drivers. That fixes the problem for about a week, then presto, same problem. After getting into the habit of re-installing drivers every Saturday, I downloaded new drivers. That helped a little bit, but doesn't solve the problem. My wife calls tech support, they tell her that our system resources are too high and we need more memory. So we set the system resources to the lowest level and I add another 512MB or RAM. Now I have 640MB of RAM and a mouse the crawls across the screen, and I still have to reinstall the print drivers about once per week.

If anyone can help me with this problem, I'd appreciate it, because otherwise, it's a pretty good product.

Recommended: No