Color prints on both plain and photo paper had rich, smooth color, and text pages looked black and sharp. Also on the Mac, scanning a 7.5-by-9.9-inch photo at 600 dots per inch averaged about 45 seconds, while scanning a 4-by-6-inch photo at 1200 dpi took about 90 seconds.
Color pages averaged 1.8 ppm on the PC and just under 0.5 ppm on the Mac. On both our PC and Mac test platforms, plain-text pages emerged at a rate of 6.4 pages per minute. The MX870’s performance is more than adequate for a small office. Augmenting the traditional four-way rocker navigation button is a scroll wheel around its edge if you prefer to twirl through options an ‘OK’ button occupies the middle of the rocker nav. Big buttons on the front control panel let you bring up its major functions (copying, faxing, scanning, and memory-card reading), and the menus appear on a 2.5-inch color LCD. One of several new inkjet MFPs introduced by Canon in recent months, the silver (with black accents) Pixma MX870 is both sporty and simple in design. For $200 (as of May 26, 2010), the Canon Pixma MX870 color inkjet multifunction printer offers a lot of features and performance for the money, especially for small-office or home-office users.
