Verdict

Pros

• Dedicated scan destinations
• Front USB socket
• Dedicated Eco-copy key

Cons

• Slow black and colour print
• Low-capacity paper tray
• No duplex print

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The main advantage of a colour laser all-in-one over an inkjet is the crispness of the text and images it can produce. The disadvantage is the cost; Canon’s i-SENSYS MF8080Cw low-end multifunction comes in at over £250 and, despite its officey looks, it falls short on the practicalities in a couple of ways.

All coloured in black and white and with a number of gentle curves to soften its lines, it’s still a substantial machine, partly due to the deep, inline, colour laser engine at its heart. The 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) has quite a high profile, though it’s only a single-sided device.

The control panel is, unusually, nearly horizontal, with buttons and a fax number pad ranged around a five line, backlit LCD display. The screen font is a bit spindly, but is easy to read. There are several buttons which are unusual in a machine like this, including two programmable scan buttons which direct images to specific PCs on a network and an ID button for copying both sides of an ID card.

Immediately below the control panel is a USB socket, which can be used for uploading documents or photos to print, or downloading scans.

At the bottom of the front panel is one of the shallowest paper trays we’ve seen on a laser device, at just 150 sheets. It’s very difficult not to be cynical and suggest Canon is trying to sell as many optional, 500-sheet paper trays as possible, by including such a mismatch of a paper tray in the i-SENSYS MF8080Cw. There’s a single-sheet multi-purpose slot for special media, but using a 150-sheet printer in any kind of office is going to require regular paper refills.

USB, 10/100 Ethernet and wireless connections are all supported, though wireless is the most versatile. Setup is straightforward, as the machine supports WPS Setup and installation of the four, combined drum and toner cartridges is also very easy, as each one drops into a slide-out tray, once you’ve folded down the front panel.

Canon provides Presto! Page Manager software to cover scanning and OCR functions, as well as its own MP Toolbox application and appropriate drivers for printer and scanner.

The i-SENSYS MF8080Cw is rated at 12ppm for black print and 8ppm for colour, but we didn’t see these speeds under test. Our five-page, black text print took 50s, equivalent to 6ppm and, although this rose to 9.6ppm for the 20-page file, it looks and feels very slow.

Five pages of black text and colour graphics took 1:08, or a speed of 4.4ppm, little more than half that the specified by Canon. The print engine is really very sluggish; compare it with https://www.trustedreviews.com/dell-2155cdn_Printer_review Dell’s 2155cdn which produced 18.5ppm for black print and 12.5ppm for colour. That machine also supports duplex print.

It’s quite surprising Canon hasn’t built two-sided print into this machine, when most mono lasers at half the price and many colour lasers at comparable price include it. It would make it much more useful as a copier, too. It took 20s to copy a single colour page and 33s to copy five pages from the ADF, although in this case the scanning finished almost before printing had started.

Print quality is hard to fault, with clean black text showing no problem artefacts, and colour graphics coming through solid and bright. There’s some slight haloing around black text over colour fills, but nothing to worry about. A colour copy shows good colour fidelity to the original, though there is some slight speckling in solid colour fills. Our test photo did better than from most colour lasers, with good rendition of hard to reproduce, darker colour shades.

The four drum and toner cartridges are available in a single capacity of 2,300 pages black and 1,500 pages for each colour. At the best prices we could find, these gave page costs of 2.8p for ISO black and 11.3p for ISO colour. These are good figures compared with rival machines in the same price bracket, from the likes of HP.

Verdict
If your main requirement from a small or home office multifunction is print quality, you won’t get much better than the Canon i-SENSYS MF8080Cw. Unfortunately, most people need to balance print quality against speed and paper handling. It’s in these areas that this machine falls down, through design decisions which range from the unfortunate to the plain silly.

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