The Canon Pixma MP980 Photo All-In-One Printer

Both models are what I would call photo-lab all-in-ones (AIOs). You can use them as All-in-ones, but you can also use them as a home photo lab without even hooking them up to your PC.  The MP970 had the distinction of printing great-looking photos while being far less expensive than any of its competition. The Pixma  MP980 carries on in this fine tradition, earning a PC Magazine Editors' Choice award of its own.

In many ways, the Pixma MP980 is a straight forward update of the MP970, sharing many of the same features. It can print, copy, scan, and e-mail by opening a message on your PC and adding a scanned document as an attachment. It can also both scan and print directly from 35mm slides and strips of film, as well as print directly from the PictBridge cameras and memory cards, thereby letting you preview photos on a 3.5-inch color LCD display. Unfortunately, neither of the two models have an automatic document feeder (ADF) or fax support.

The changes in the ink system delivers a couple several important differences between the two generations of printer, such as slightly slower speeds for the Pixma MP980 and  more impressive, better-looking monochrome photos.

I viewed the printer on a PC using Windows XP, but Canon  also ships it with drivers and a full set of software for Windows Vista, Windows 2000, and Mac OS 10.3.9 to 10.5 Physical setup is standard for a Canon printer. If you can find a spot for the 7.9-by-15.2-by-18.5-inch AIO, plug in the power cord, load paper, and snap in the print head and cartridges, with a separate cartridge for each ink you will be good to go.

Network installation is basically the same as other Canon wireless printers  l think it is decidedly different when compared with most other printers. To install the MP980 for a network connection, you have to use a USB cable, tell the installation program that you want to use a network connection, and then remove the USB cable. This approach means the printer has to be within USB cable range when you install it. Then, after setup, you can move it to wherever you actually want to use it.

Unfortunately, Canon designed it so you have to set the Pixma MP980 printer to connect by either wireless or wired network. Allowing both is not an option. That means you can't have the printer set to work on a wired network (This lets me out.  My desktop is wired to the cable modem and I don't want to buy a wireless adapter., and then connect to it with an adhoc wireless connection from, say, your notebook, on an occasional basis. This isn't a serious problem for some, but it does make the Wi-Fi support less flexible than it could be.

To me, its speed is a little on the slow side, but still tolerable. Photo speed was a lot better, with an average of 1:13 for each 4-by-6 and 2:01 for each 8-by-10. The Epson Artisan 800 was a bit faster for 4-by-6s, at 59 seconds, but a bit slower for 8-by-10s, at 2:08.

The real test for any photocentric printer, is its photo quality, not its speed. And the Canon Pixma MP980 excels on that score. You can pretty much count on almost any inkjet printer today being able to print photos that are as good at what you'd get from your local drugstore. Photos printed on the Pixma MP980 are much closer to a professional photo labs output, with quality suitable for framing. This applies equally to the photos printed from a computer, a camera, film, and even to original photographic prints copied with the printer's Photo Reprint option. Monochrome photos deserve special mention for their absolutely neutral grays and impressively subtle shading.

Photos should also last a reasonably long time. Canon claims a lifetime of 300 years for dark storage (as in an album but then who is to know?), 30 years framed behind glass, and 20 years exposed to air. The photos proved both water-resistant and reasonably scratch-resistant, which means you can hand them out for people to enjoy without your worrying about them coming back smudged or scratched.  (Note that I said water resistant, not water proof.)

The Canon Pixma MP980 Photo printer also does well on graphics. Like many printers, it does tend to lose thin lines, but,otherwise,  the graphics are  good enough to offer to an important client or customer, and easily good enough for any internal business use. As with other Canon printers, however, full-page graphics tend to make the plain paper curl. So if you use many full-page graphics, you may need to spend a little extra on a more-expensive, heavier-weight paper.

Text quality is the MP980's weakest point. Fewer than half the fonts tested  qualified as both easily readable and well formed at any size smaller than 10 points. Some were easily readable at smaller sizes, but suffered from character spacing issues. Therefore, if most of what you print is at 10-point size and larger, the text is certainly suitable for your schoolwork or internal business use.

Like the MP970 before it, the Canon Pixma MP980 Wireless Photo All-In-One has  room for improvement, but its flaws are easily forgivable.  In particular, I do wish Canon would improve the network installation routine.  On the other hand, the Pixma MP980's photo quality and its ability to both scan slides and print high-quality photos directly from slides is way out in front of any competition at anything like this price. That more than makes up for the flaws, and it earns the MP980 a solid place as PC Magazine Editors' Choice for photo-lab All-In-One.

Read another review of the Canon Pixma MP980.