Canon imageClass MF5950dw

The Canon imageClass MF5950dw ($400 street), a multi-function mono laser printer for a small or micro office, is a near twin to the Canon imageClass MF5960dn ($500 street, 3.5 stars). The MF5950dw adds wireless connectivity, while the MF5960dn lacks Wi-Fi but includes PostScript and PCL drivers in addition to Canon?s UFR II MFP driver, which is the MF5950dw?s sole printer driver. They proved nearly identical in print speed and output quality, reasonably fast and with good text output but problematic graphics. They?re both solid printers and worth considering; your preference between the two would depend on whether Wi-Fi or the extra drivers is more important.

Design and Features

The boxy white MF5950dw measures 17.0 by 15.4 by 18.6 ?inches (HWD), and weighs 40.4 pounds. It has a 250-sheet paper cassette plus a 50-sheet multi-purpose input tray for a total capacity of 300 sheets, and an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. If you need more capacity, a 500-sheet tray is available for $200 (street).

The MF5950dw has a 50-sheet duplexing ADF (automatic document feeder), which lets you copy, scan, or fax both sides of a two-sided sheet of paper. This MFP prints, copies, scans, and faxes; prints from (and scans to) a USB thumb drive (there?s no memory-card reader); scans to computers either directly over a network; scans to e-mail; and faxes over a network as well. It provides secure printing for businesses and workgroups of up to 15 people.

The MF5950dw can connect directly to a computer via USB or to a LAN by Ethernet or WiFi. I tested it over a USB connection using a computer running Windows Vista.

Canon recently started shipping some of its laser printers set with duplex printing (printing on both sides of a sheet of paper) as the default mode. Duplex printing is a good way to save paper when you?re printing in draft mode, and there are some documents you?d want two-sided final copies of. For a given document, duplex printing tends to be somewhat slower than simplex (single-sided) printing. As a rule, we do our business applications testing using a printer?s default settings, as typical users tend to stick to them, so we tested the MF5950dw in duplex mode.

Speed and Output Quality

Keeping the MFP?s default duplex print settings, I timed the MF5950dw on the latest version of our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at an effective 10.5 pages per minute (ppm), in line with its 35-ppm rated speed. Our test combines text pages, graphics pages, and pages containing both text and graphics; the rated speed is based on printing text documents without graphics or photos. Its speed is identical to the MF5960dn and virtually tied with the Editors? Choice Brother MFC-8480dn, which we tested at 10.6 ppm. Although we tested the MF5950dw in its default duplex mode, it was slightly faster when I tried it in simplex. The MF5950dw was zippy at photo printing, averaging 7 seconds per 4-by-6 print.

Output Quality

Text quality was typical of a laser, which is to say very good. It was fine for any typical business purpose short of demanding desktop publishing in which the use of very small fonts is required.

Graphics quality was below par for a laser. Dithering (graininess) is a common problem with laser-printed graphics; with the MF5950dw it went beyond graininess to easily resolvable dot patterns. One of our test illustrations is designed to identify posterization, abrupt changes in shading where they should be gradual; in this case there was almost no change in shading, with the brighter detail all but lost. Most printers have trouble printing out very thin, light lines against a dark background, but in this case the lines were totally lost. In certain illustrations where lighter text appears against a dark background, many printers will print a negative image so the type appears black on a light background. Usually we accept this, but on one page the type just vanished. I wouldn?t feel comfortable distributing handouts printed out on the without closely inspecting them in advance.

Photos were of typical quality for a laser. They showed a decent range of detail but also? substantial dithering (dot patterns). The quality was fine for printing out recognizable images from Web pages, but whether you?d want to use them, say, for client newsletters, depends on how picky you are?and who your clients are.

The Canon imageClass MF5950dw is a capable mono laser MFP for a small or micro office. If you need Wi-Fi connectivity, it?s a clear choice over the MF5960dn and $100 less, though it lacks the versatility that the latter?s extra drivers affords. The Editors? Choice Brother MFC-8480DN offers comparable speed and good output quality across the board, while the 5950dw stumbles on graphics.

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