CANON IMAGECLASS D480 TONER CARTRIDGE

Canon ImageCLASS D480 Review

Overview:

With lukewarm print speeds and slightly above average print resolution, the Canon ImageCLASS D480 may not be much of an eye catcher, but it does come complete with a full set of easy to use multifunctional document handling tools that result in an affordable, efficient way for a small office to print and copy.

Pros:

With what Canon calls “all mode duplex capabilities” the Canon ImageCLASS D480 is not only capable of duplex printing, but duplex scanning as well. The unit’s duplex automatic document feeder can reverse pages of input so that they are scanned on both sides of the material. The data can then be copied to a double sided piece of output, making two sided paper handling easier than ever.

The printer gets a respectable boost over the all too common 600 x 600 dot per inch print quality with its true 1200 x 600 resolution. This means that the device has double the accuracy than the 600 dpi units and can do a much better job of handling imagery and lines. This little boost in quality will also keep text looking noticeably sharper to the naked eye.

The optical scan resolution of the unit is a mere 600 x 600 dots per inch, but interpolated scanning can bring this up to 9600 x 9600 dots per inch for beyond photo quality. Color scans at 24 bits are possible as well as black and white, though copying can expectedly only be done in monochrome.

The Canon ImageCLASS D480 is also a formidable fax machine equipped with Super G3 fax abilities that run at 33.6 Kbps. The automatic document feeder holds up to 50 sheets of fax material that can be fed automatically and transmitted at a rate of about 2 seconds per page.

Up to 256 pages of input or output fax data can be stored in the devices fax page memory so the unit can scan the output material and preserve it faster than it can transmit it, and users can move on to other processes while the modem is at work. This also prevents incoming faxes from being lost due to an unexpected paper outage or an occupied printer.

Cons:

The 23 page per minute print speed of the Canon ImageCLASS D480 is just below average for a multifunctional monochrome laser printer. While the device can certainly get the job done if given the time, other brands such as Lexmark are putting out 35 page per minute monsters in the same price range, making the ImageCLASS series a little less desirable. The first copy out time of the device is 9 seconds which, though unimpressive, is acceptable.

One other nitpicky downside to this machine is its small platen glass. While legal sized material can be scanned or faxed by way of the automatic document feeder, the platen glass is only 8.5 x 11.7 inches. This makes it impossible to scan a legal sized document in the conventional way, and impossible to scan extra large material such as a magazine spread.