Before I go any further I should mention that my previous experience with Canon wasn’t a good one. I’m not big on model numbers and such but I think it was a Canon PIXMA IP1000 or thereabouts. So I needed a printer and happened to be in this computer shop. These computer salesmen... anyway after hearing at length about how this particular printer would rock my world and change my life and so on, I decided to give it a shot. I have to say I was impressed with how light and compact it was. When I took it out of the box I realised that it wasn’t too ugly either and it printed really well. You’re wondering which part of this experience was bad so I’m telling you to be patient. I’m getting there....
I neglected to mention that I own a cat. Now normally a cat would have no earthly place in a review for a printer but humour me. This particular cat (whose name is Charles, but that’s largely unimportant for the purposes of this particular review) wakes up once in a while to eat and on rarer occasions he relives his mad kitten days and tears about like a lunatic. It was under the influence of one of these particular fits that he inadvertently kicked my nice new light and compact printer off the computer table. It crashed to the ground and thereafter made a loud groaning clanking noise whenever I powered it up and did little else. Customer care was not very helpful I might add.
"Yes? Excuse me? Your cat did WHAT? It dropped 4 feet? I’m sorry the warranty does not cover that. Have a nice day..." <click>
So there I was without a printer - sad, helpless and alone in the world. Well not quite but you get the picture... Then I saw an ad in the paper for the Canon PIXMA MP160. "It does everything" the ad proclaimed in letters of bold. Now of course I knew that to be an exaggeration, but then I am a reasonable human being who doesn’t expect a printer to come up with a prize-winning mushroom omelette, so I decided to investigate. It turned out that this particular piece of equipment was capable of printing near-photo quality and scanning images while moonlighting as a photocopier. All for the realtively modest price of Rs 5000 (or thereabouts)
So I took it home and unpacked it. To my everlasting relief it is a lot larger and heavier than my late printer. Charles would need to do some serious weight training and be regular with his vitamin supplements to budge this thing! I was very impressed with the print quality. I printed up a few photographs I’d been storing on my computer and I have to say if you print on photo paper you’d have to look pretty closely to notice the difference in quality. This excited me no end and soon I was printing photographs in earnest. Somewhere around the 33rd print, my colour cartridge dried up. Now let me tell you if my previous printer had survived long enough to warrant a cartridge change, I would have thought long and hard before reinvesting in Canon. The ink cartridges are incredibly pricey!!!
On the scanning front this model leaves much to be desired. The scans are invariably blurry even at the highest resolution. I haven’t tested the OCR capability yet because I don’t as a rule scan documents for editing. The photocopy function has come in handy once or twice and the good thing about this is you don’t need to power up your computer to use it. However it’s pretty basic. You can’t make any enlargements or reductions in this mode.
This is a good printer for home use and that’s the bottom line. If you want a scanner for professional use, this product is not for you. The scanner and photocopy function are there as a sales gimmick, much like the new phones that double as mp3 players. It definitely isn’t the most economical printer out there, which is bad news for me because I like printing graphics in high quality colour. However it does print well. They didn’t lie about that. Oh and it’s cat-proof....