Canon features a great deal of multifunction models throughout its range and the i-Sensys MF4690PL is at the top end of its latest set of launches.
This unit features a comparatively small footprint, even though you'll find it deeper compared to many. The control panel is held upon a couple of posts, that affords an all round impression of having a dark-grey cowl across the front of the unit. This makes it a bit more difficult to reload the 250-sheet paper tray and much more tough to make use of the 10-sheet multi-purpose tray, whose guides now live about 100mm into the cowl.
The Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) includes a steeply raked feed tray and it will carry 35 pages for extended copy and fax work. The flatbed scanner can manage 24-bit colour at a possible optical resolution of 600ppi, although using enhancement this grows to 9,600ppi.
Canon has managed to keep the control panel commendably user friendly. The 2-line by 16-character LCD display is backlit, with three control buttons in front for navigating menus and three right behind designed for mode options. Off to the right there is a fax number pad plus to the left is a set of seven quick-dial numbers for frequently used recipients. The Start and Stop buttons are large and at the right-hand side of the panel along with a number of controls, for example enlargement, brightness and also document type, range along the length of a silver panel behind the main controls.
There is a dual-purpose USB port situated under the control panel at the right, that enables scanning of documents straight to a USB drive as PDF files as well as printing or faxing of documents from a PDF.
Software furnished with the i-Sensys MF4690PL includes PageManager and also OmniPage, well known programs with regards to document management and OCR, respectively. There's also the CanonMF Toolbox, offering fast and simple admittance to e-mail, OCR scanning and the creation of PDF documents.
The device is a competent fax, in addition to offering print, copy as well as scan features. Canon states it will transmit a page in three seconds and it's modeled round a Super G3 fax modem, which means it can produce as much as 256 greyscales. The MF4690PL additionally has a 512-page fax memory, therefore it will be able to deal with lots of inbound faxes, whether or not the paper tray's not loaded.
Our five-page text and text and graphics tests yield speeds of 11.1ppm and 11.5ppm, barely fifty percent of the stated speed. Whenever we tested the 20-page document, we saw 15.4ppm. The unit features automatic duplex, thus we ran the 20-page document double-sided, as well, generating 10 pages in 122 seconds, equal to 9.8ppm.
Copies of our text and graphics page required 13 seconds through the ADF and eight seconds through the flatbed glass. Each of these times are outstanding.
The caliber of the pages created is mostly fine, even though there's some moderate spatter around the serifs of text characters. Greyscale graphics are just reasonable, with a few tints possessing a spotty appearance to them together with mid-greys displaying a visible crosshatching. When it's in normal use, it is likely you won't observe these types of characteristics; there are actually laser printers and also multifunctions with a comparable price tag, which generally do not display them.
A photocopy of our text and graphics page showed a bit of deterioration in level of quality of greyscale reproduction, so a few lighter tints were practically gone. Our test photograph print, when using the printer's dedicated photograph setting, turned out nicely, having fine levels of depth and, strangely enough, a smaller amount of the blotchiness than we found in the business graphics print.
The sole consumable is a drum and toner cartridge. The Canon i-Sensys MF4690PL toner cartridge is rated as 2,000 pages. It places the i-Sensys MF4690PL in a very fair spot next to its primary rivals.
Canon i-Sensys MF4690PL toner cartridges are available here.
Theodore Beach is a member of the Cartridge Concept team which specialises in printer cartridges.
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