I’ve been using my Canon MultiPass F30 for six months, and am still happy with it. Because I tend to put my printers through hell, I’m always shocked when one comes through, even after six months, unscorched. This one has, and without costing me thousands of dollars in ink. Although the printer itself is pricey (I paid about $250 for it), the savings on ink over my last printer has made up the difference in price.

Just the facts

Although you can get this from the user guide, I had a hard time finding the specs on Canon’s website. Here they are:

Print Speed and Resolution
Black: 17.0 ppm, 600x600 dpi
Color: 12.0 ppm, 2400x1200 dpi

Paper Sizes
Legal, Letter, Envelopes

Ink type
BCI-3eX (C,M,Y,K) ink tanks. Note that the print heads are semi-permanent, and don’t get replaced with each cartridge change. This keeps the price of the ink down.

Copy zoom
25% to 400%

Resolution and Scan depth
Copying resolution: Monochrome-600x600; Color-1200x1200 dpi
Scanning Resolution: 200x 1200 dpi optical (9600 dpi enhanced)
Scan Depth: 36-bit color, 12-bit grayscale

Dimensions for this horse
Width: 17.3", Height: 23.0", Depth: 12.8", Weight: 22.0 lbs. (that’s a LOT of desk space!)

Set up

I understand the functional purpose for the tape, but it’s terribly annoying to track down every last piece they use to strap down the printer parts. The Multipass F30 comes out of the box in hard paper trays and GOBS of tape. But once you get it all unpacked, setup is really a breeze. It comes with an illustrated Quick Start Guide to help you figure out which tray goes where—there’s a paper tray on top and a collection tray on the bottom that you have to put together. But even without the guide, it’s all pretty intuitive. The packaging includes a CD with MultiPASS Suite 4.0 software. The Suite includes a user guide and drivers for Windows 95/98/2000/Me, Win NT 4.0 (or later) and Windows XP (the printer is not compatible with Macs). The CD also contains ScanSoft OmniPage Pro OCR Software.
Along with the software and the printer, the box contains a printed user guide, and full size ink cartridges (separate cartridges for black, cyan, magenta, and yellow). Not included are the parallel or USB printer cables. Setup really was a breeze, and I had no problems installing the drivers on Windows XP.

What I really like…

I’ve already mentioned the savings on ink cartridges, but it’s worth another mention. I’ve replaced my black cartridge about four times in six months, and I usually print in grayscale draft mode just to save ink. However, I print the equivalent of three full science journals a week—that’s a lot of dense text and photos. I’ve only had to replace the black and yellow cartridge, and love that I’m not wasting other colors just because I’ve used up one color. I haven’t had any problems with a clogged printhead either, even though they aren’t being replaced each time I change the ink. I’m also able to ignore the “out of ink” warnings for a while. You can click ‘resume’ on the printer to ignore the warning, and as long as I’m printing in draft mode and it’s the black cartridge that’s running low, I can crank out at least twenty more pages. I’m cheap, can you tell?

I found the black and white page per minute claims to hold up-if you print in draft mode. Color printing was a little slower, but still faster than my office Lexmark printer. The output is clean, with crisp text (yes, even in draft!). The text is especially brilliant on coated paper, with reproductions so incredibly close to the original, I’ve been asked if I ordered reprints from publishers of original articles. Could this be the result of using Microfine Droplet Technology? The color output was just as good for me, although I can’t seem to ignore the ink warnings as long when it’s the color cartridges that run low.

The integrated flatbad scanner rocks, and although I hate the user interface for the software, it can come in handy here. The “control panel” interface consists of four buttons (you can set them as large or small, depending on how cluttered you like your desktop!). The buttons allow you to scan directly to outlook (or other email applications), your hard drive, or to the OCR software. Other buttons are customizable, allowing you to scan to your photo editor or elsewhere. It’s not intuitive though; you have to kind of hunt (or read the manual) to find this out. I haven’t had any problems with my color or grayscale scans—both seem pretty crisp and clear.

The copier is decent too. I refuse to use it for large-scale copying, because it’s not as fast as the big commercial things, but it’s good for home copying. Just lay your copy down in on the scanner bed, push a button, and zoom-there it is, copyright infringement laws broken right and left. Reproduction is true, and the zoom and reduce functions work the way they’re supposed to.

What I don’t like…

I really hate the Multipass Suite. I hate that the toolbar stays open and that sometimes the ‘minimize’ button just disappears. I also strongly dislike icon driven menus—but I know that’s a personal preference. I don’t like the buttons and I don’t like the room they take up. I also don’t like that the toolbar flashes at me if it’s open and my printer is turned off or offline. Flash when I go to use it, not constantly! Honestly, this is my only complaint—I scan directly in my applications, so I rarely use the toolbar for anything, but if you shut it down, the printer won’t work!

I also ran into problems using an external ZIP with my printer plugged into the zip parallel port. They just wouldn’t work together, so I finally had to switch to the USB cable. But because the printer is so big, it sits way up high on my desk (the only place I had to put it), so getting to the cables was a huge pain.

The bottom line

This was an excellent buy. I’m really thrilled with the performance of the Canon Multipass. Besides the annoying software, its been a godsend-reliable operation, intuitive buttons, crisp output. If something does go wrong, I hope it happens within the next six months. Canon offers a one-year warranty with free tech support available by phone, Monday through Saturday. After that, phone support is still available, but for a $9.99 per call fee.


Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 250
Operating System: Windows