Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Review of Canon color Imageclass MF644Cdw printer. I am a retired IT professional working with computers over 40 years experience. After careful consideration this was the printer I chose. There is not much not to like about this printer. Software is basic but functional. There is far more functionality than my retired status will ever use however for a low load office, this printer is ideal, with the ability of using certificates and encryption for remote printing and faxing. One should download the full user manual. The PDF manual is almost 700 pages long and addresses the extended functionalities for IT professionals. These days I do not need and will most likely not use any of the remote capabilities, but it appears very capable. I had no issue finding the correct manual from the manufacturer from the install cd. The quick start guide included in packaging will be sufficient for most home and small office users. Unpacking. I highly recommend when unpacking to leave the printer on the floor. If you do, as I did, place it on a table to unpack, you will move the printer back to the floor 3X. The unpacking diagram clearly shows leaving it on the floor, and the diagram is correct. The packaging itself is a work of nice engineering, with limited waste but high shipping protection, and first out of included components. Lots of bright orange shipping tape to remove, ensure you open doors of printer to get it all. Hint; all the pull ends of the tape are folded over. Knowing this helps you determine the best way to pull the tape and the order of pulling it off. Not much direction in removing it, but observation of tape ends helps in unpacking. Note: this printer does not come with USB printer cable, either style of full sized usb cable will work, either the rounded serial or standard . I had several on hand. It does come with power and phone cable, a plastic piece that is used as a paper dust cover used only when printer is loaded with legal sized paper,(piece not normally installed for standard paper) and a quick start guide. The manuals do not address the plastic piece and I did scratch my head. Toner: Toner cartridges come preinstalled. I have yet to change toner in spite of my printing however it looks straight forward. A strong feature of this printer is the number of after market toners available for this printer. I was able to buy a full set of aftermarket high yield cartridges rated highly for this printer from Amazon for less than the cost of ink jet cartridges I had previously been using. Cost of ownership was the number one reason I bought this printer. Printing has been flawless with a single exception. I copied a photo, then printed out the result in several sizes. I was disappointed that photos were too red. I do not believe this was a printer flaw as air dropped photos printed on regular paper (not photo paper) printed with no observable color distortion. (I have since determined adjusting for color in my graphics software corrected the color distortion issue, as I thought, an adjustment was all that was required) I performed a water test on the printed page with a splatter of water droplets. There was no distortion or “ink run” of the toner. It performed better that just a water drop on plain paper would have no bleed or run. Copying no issue, fast enough from printer wakeup for my needs. I have used both the sheet feeder as well as the platen glass. The duplex capability works fine with no opposite side paper bleed-through. The multi sheet feeder works well. Note : ensure no staples of paperclips are attached to documents. Multi sheet feeders in general don’t like them. I did not test recoverabilityI of that mistake.. in what I tested, no paper jams occurred. Air dropped photos from iPad worked easily. Setting up the printer on a wireless network was simple, just used the sync menu item and the router sync to connect. I did not use the Android method but suspect it works as well. It requires an android software package installed to operate on an android device. it required little setup, just select print, then select device. If you live in an apartment or where other wireless networks exist, you may choose to register the devices with the printer to restrict printing. I live isolated from other networks, so for me I wanted to leave the printer open so my visitors could print easily if needed. Fax I did not use Fax capability, but setup appears fairly straight forward and allows department header tags, important for small business. Email: Nice email capability. Note: it can send images via PDF or as individual pictures depending on settings and can be changed. Follow directions in the user manual PDF to use this functionality, can be set for multiple users, though I never tested this capability. OCR (Optical Character Recognition). For test of accuracy I scanned a standard Times Roman text and reviewed the output in notepad. The result was 100% accuracy. Because I used notepad formatting was lost, not unexpected. I have done a lot of scanning over the years this appears to be about as good as it gets. I did not test multi fonts or fonts on color as my experience says error probably can be induced. But for reading a plain text document, the tool is excellent. Be sure to download the manual linked on included CD. 700 pages in the full manual, as there are very sophisticated remote print capabilities that can be used as securely as you choose to set it up to include certificate and NIC registration capability. Software installed easily. The software is minimalist in nature, but very functional. On Windows 10. I did not test Linux or IOS other than the airdrop print capability on the pad. In summary, after using this printer for about a month, to the home user I say this is the printer you want, it costs a bit more, but the cost of ownership should be a fraction of ink cost over the life of the printer.. With a number of choices for toner from second source manufactures, make this choice a no brainer. To the IT professional, this is a good choice for small low print yield application. It could work for office up to 10 fairly readily provided the office print requirement relatively Modest. Print from sleep has been reliable, I have not seen issues other reviewers have reported. It has sophisticated over the net capability, as well as firewall port switching capability. Full manual is comprehensive enough to set it up for an IT PRO. Being retired, I not only did not need capability, but turned it off. This is a sound choice. Not a paid review. Addendum: 8 months after purchase and use i can say this is the best home printer I have owned. I still rate this printer at 5 stars. I have become very familiar with various features. It has performed flawlessly. I have paid for this printer just in cost of ownership. I never realized just how much I needed the duplexing feature and it works well with this printer. It performs well with common various paper weghts. No doubt I would choose it again. It simply works. One caveat, while default photos work, I found tuning colors for the printer, improves picture quality. If you are using photo paper, you will want to adjust the color somewhat to match original. Once you have made the color tweak adjustment, it shuld work for photos well. Default works but tweaked the colors are very good.