Customer Reviews

Canon MultiPass F80 Multifunction

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I wanted a quality all-in-one solution for my home office and personal use, and after some research my options boiled down to 2 models: the HP Officejet D145 and the Canon Multipass F80. Since I couldn't find a store anywhere that had BOTH of these models running for comparison, I bought ONE OF EACH and brought them home for my own evaluation.

I bought the HP D145 first. The PROS: Fast, great quality prints and copies even on plain paper in "Normal" mode. Makes double-sided copies. Multi-format card reader. Good software and tutorials. Intuitive and easy to use frontpanel buttons.

CONS: Printed manual only covers a few of the options, and help files on the CD cover the rest. Won't print borderless photos. If you need to copy something that has printing near the edges of the original, you need to reduce a few percentage points first or you'll end-up with cropped copies.

I printed a few photos from my PC and also from my Nikon Coolpix 995 3.3 megapixel digital camera using the card reader. If the photos are well lit and of high quality, they will print nicely on Photo quality paper. The only catch is the 1/4" border around the edge. I haven't tried printing on 4x6" photo paper yet, but my guess is that the border will print there as well. Some may not see this as a big deal, but if you want to print copies of scanned photos or digital camera images, they won't look the same as other photographs in your album if they have borders around them. An option is to make 4x6" prints on full sheets of paper, but then you have to cut them by hand. This is also a waste of expensive paper.

Having been impressed by the HP D145, but underwhelmed by it's inability to create borderless photo prints, I decided to see what the Canon F80 had to offer. For more than a hundred dollars less, it seemed logical to compare the two to see what HP was providing for the extra money. I also thought there was a chance that the quality of photo prints from the HP weren't that great, but I had nothing to compare to.

I bought a Canon Multipass F80, and the first thing I noticed was it's smaller size and compact footprint. It didn't come with a USB cable, and the only way to connect to your computer was with... a USB CABLE! It seems a little crazy to me that they don't include a cable that probably costs them pennies. Luckily, I had a extra one available. Having already experimented with the HP a couple of days earlier, I knew right off the bat what I wanted to know about this machine... so I tried to print a full page photo from the Cardreader. It wouldn't recognize the card at first, so after some digging throught the manual I discovered that the card must be formatted by the camera and NOT the PC. After I did this, and took a few new photos, the F80 was able to recognize the card (Compactflash only). I printed an index first, and compared to the HP D145 the photos were very small (stamp sized, compared the HP's ~1x2" index photos). The HP has this cool feature that let's you select the photo(s) and print sizes of images on the index page... then you scan the page and it automagically prints your selections. The Canon F80 doesn't do this, but I'm not sure how often I would even use this feature if I had it. There is nothing in the F80 manual that leads me to believe that you can increase the size of the thumbnails.

Canon F80 PROS: Higher quality photo prints. I ran a page of wallet sized prints from the cardreader on both machines, and a close inspection revealed slightly better quality on the Canon. In fact, it was impossible to tell that it wasn't an actual photo-lab print on the Canon. The HP looked good, but you could see a slight bit of dithering in some areas. Unless you use a magnifying glass on the photos hanging on your wall, you'll never notice the difference, but I wanted to point it out nonetheless. I also printed a photo using the borderless option, and WOW!! Again, a perfect photograph printed to the edge of the paper... just like you'd get from Kodak. Compared to the same full page print on the HP d145, the F80 print was larger (borderless) and brighter.

I haven't used either of these machines enough yet to know anything about the ink usage and long-term costs. The F80 uses 4 different colored ink tanks, and the HP D145 uses 1 black and 1 color tank... but the large color tank feeds ink to 4 separate color printheads. I'm not clear on how this works exactly, but I imagine that when you run out of Yellow ink, you'll need to replace the whole color cartridge. Only time will tell for sure, and I'll decide to take one of these back before I get that far.

COMPARISON:
HP D145 wins: quality of color copies and prints on normal paper, double-sided copies, index print quality, software.

CANON F80 wins: photo print quality, borderless prints, small footprint, lower cost.

UNKNOWN: speed and scanning ability (untested)

BOTTOM LINE: It depends on what's important to you. Compare the PROS and CONS and decide what's the best fit for your needs.

Good luck!

I just got the MFD today, but already I can say it rocks! The auto feeder is one of my favorite features. I can put a stack (about 10) of legal pages in it and then go into Acrobat and tell it to scan. I go about my business, and minutes later I have converted hard copy docs into a pdf file.

The printer is excellent quality from what I've seen so far. I haven't printed on photo paper yet, but other reviews rave about the high quality.

Setup is easy, if you follow the setup card. No problems, even got my two wireless laptops printing to it within minutes.

The only negative I see is that the lcd display on the unit is really hard to see. I noticed this in the store and hoped it was just on the demo, but the one I bought was the same way. You can see it, but compared to the HP display it's not nearly as good. I can't find a contrast control to adjust it either. But this is really minor.

I really like the software that comes with it. The Multipass toolbar looks really nice and gives you all the functionality you could want.

I can't find any feature I need that is missing.

I have other canon products, G1 digital camera, flatbed scanner, and I love both.

Also, some reviews complained about USB only and no USB cable included. I say, welcome to the 2000's. USB beats the hell out of parallel. Also, USB cables are a bit expensive. I already had one and really would not of wanted to pay more for this product so I could get a cable included.

I like HP products, but this one was quite a bit less costly than the d145, had the same features, and I read all the reports of HP's print cartridges not lasting. I decided to give Canon a chance since I love my other products, and I'm glad I did.

Good luck.

The Canon F80 multifunction does everything and performs flawlessly!!! The print quality is perfect. It can determine the difference between a regular phone call and a fax transmission, so you don't need another phone line for faxes. You can scan or fax from either the flatbed or the document feeder. It is USB 2.0 compliant, very fast! It can print borderless.

I'm glad I bought it!!!

Canon has done an excellent job engineering this device!

I have done too much research b4 buying this unit so I feel an obligation to share what I've learned. If you are looking for a multifunction unit, you only have 2 viable options in my opinion. They are the HP and the Canon.

IT basically comes down to this: go see the machines. I did and this is what I've found. The canon is a BETTER BUILT machine by far. The paper handling is superior to the HP and if you care about your margins being even, you MUST get the Canon. That is what ultimately decided it for me as I will be using is for resumes/cover letters/envelopes etc.

The thing that pushes you towards the HP is print quality. HP simply has less ink diffusion on the page. The Canon does print well, and well enough for me but there is no denying that HP is better. Overall, it's a tradeoff but I chose the Canon and I do not regret it.

The reason I am ok with the slightly less print quality is a) I have a laser backup printer I can use if need be. And b) you can always use special inkjet printer which will increase the print quality for important documents.

The one feature on the HP 145 I did like was the ability to make dual sided copies. Ah well...

Hope this helps...

Overall I'm VERY pleased with the F80. So far it has done everything claimed for it, and done it well. (I haven't tried photo quality printing yet, or the PCMCIA card adapter as my uses are very business oriented)

The front panel is well thought out, maybe even intutitive, at least by current stardards (eg. dvd remotes). The software also is straight forward, quite easy to learn and does pretty much what you'd expect it to do. I would like to be able to do a little more from the computer and not have to resort to the front panel for things like certain fax reports. But the front panel is easy enough to use so this is not a big complaint.

The physical machine itself seems to be well made, with a more solid and serious look and feel than some of its competitors (hp 135 in particular is very plasticky). That's just my lay person's impression, and is not based on any expert knowledge.

I'm running the printer off a 900MH P4 machine under Windows ME and have had no problems. Setup went smoothly.

Nice surprises: Copy features like 2 on 1, image repeat and reduce to fit. Better color fidelity than expected. Intuitive and useful front panel. Good documentation. Peforms all functions as well as or better than I expected.

Not so nice surprises: Platen is 8-1/2 x 11. Legal size sheets can only be copied through the automatic document feeder, which has a slightly narrower scan than the platen. Manual fax reception is only do-able from a phone connected to the F80 itself. Other extensions won't work. And the autodocument feed reverse collates the output (put pages 1-10 with 1 on top into adf, copies come out 10-1 with 10 on top). And the LCD is hard to read.

My verdict -- 4 stars.

I had a tough time finding a multipurpose machine that had the requirements I wanted. It came down to the Canon F50 and HP D135. I almost purchased the HP, but two things bothered me. The price and the fact that reviews said the machine ate ink cartridges like crazy. Canon then released the F80 and decided to look into that one. It seemed to have features comparable to the HP D145 .... The Canon is ... cheaper. Set up on the Canon was very easy. I initially had problems being able to scan, but it turns out that the USB hub was the problem, and not the printer. It now works perfectly. I am very comfortable with Canon products as I am a Photographer as a hobby and all my equipment is Canon. All my 35mm gear, a Canon G2 digital camera, and a S9000 photo printer. I've been extremely happy with Canon and their customer service. My only dealing with them was to repair the G2 for defective cracking of the case and that matter was resolved promptly.

Canon MultiPass F80 met all of my expectations EXCEPT one. It cannot be DIRECTLY connected to a network through a PRINT SERVER. This is NOT a Post Script printer and therefore, would not interface with either Linksys or Hawking print servers. Spent many hours on the phone will technical support of Linksys, Hawking, and Canon who ALL said to give up trying. In fact, Canon said this machine is NOT designed to be networked and that is their "official position."

The only way I could Network the Canon F80 was to connect it directly to a shared PC on my network with a USB cable (NOT supplied by Canon, by the way.) As long as this shared PC is powered ON, the Canon MultiPass F80 can be accessed by my other PC's and wireless Think Pads on the network.

Has everything you ask for. Much cheaper and more robust than a comparable HP MFD. Cheaper ink.
Contrary to other reviews, this CAN be used on a Network using Microsoft Print Sharing without any problems.

have had this printer for over 6 months now.
use it for scanning, faxing, copying and of course printing.
It works very well.. color images come out pretty sharp
and neat, with great resolution.
another great thing is that even if you run out of ink in
one tank, it will still continue to print (albeit the
printouts will be without that color !).

Well, after reading the other reviews I figured I couldn't go wrong. Just hooked it up today and by following the setup card, it was a snap. Tested some of the functions and I'm impressed! Just printed out a photo and WOW, it kicks butt over my Epson Stylus Color 900. Oh, it's very quiet too...so you can print late at night without waking the family. The only minuses that I can find (at least for me) is the letter size scan bed and it only has one paper tray. At about [half] less than the HP145, it was an easy choice.