PRINTING. The Canon imageCLASS MF6160dw prints using laser technology, which picks up powdered 'toner' on a roller and fuses it to the paper with heat. It prints black-and-white text with excellent quality, as we've come to expect from a laser printer. Text printing was very quick, 20 pages per minute, costing 3.2 cents per page. Its black-and-white graphics printing is very good for reports, newsletters and web pages. It has an auto duplex feature that lets you print both on sides of the page, with no loss of quality. The capacity of the main paper tray is 250 sheets, a generous size. There's a second tray for full-size paper, allowing you to load letterhead paper, for instance.
SCANNING and COPYING. Scanning performance was very good, fine for general-purpose scanning. It can scan or copy an area up to 10.9 x 8.5 inches. Copying performance was excellent, producing copies very close to the original. There's an automatic document feeder to let you copy or scan a stack of pages in one operation. The automatic document feeder can even copy or scan both sides of the pages. Includes OCR (optical character recognition) software, useful for making scanned documents editable in a word processor program.
CONTROLS and DISPLAY. The printer has a medium-size 2.8-inch display screen.
CONNECTIVITY and NETWORKING. You can connect directly to a PC with a USB cable, or to your network router either wirelessly with WiFi or with an Ethernet cable. This model has built-in faxing, can store incoming faxes if the paper runs out, and can send faxes from an attached PC. The size and weight of this printer makes it more suitable for an office than a home. This printer was noisier than most while printing, so you might want to locate it away from sleeping areas.
