The Canon Pixma MG8170 is by no means small. It weighs a massive 10.7kg and is slightly bigger than the size of the standard desktop printer. It comes in a glossy black design and looks quite stylish. However, as with all glossy designs, this one too attracted a lot of fingerprints and rubbing them off was a major problem.
The top of the 8170 includes the LCD screen and the touch panel. The touch panel has the directional pad, home and return button, ‘+’ and ‘-’ button for choosing the number of prints, the print button – with colour and black printout option – and three buttons for selecting the menu. From the looks of it, this initially sounds a little confusing and might have a steep learning curve but with the initial few button presses, or rather ‘touches’, you’ll get the exact function of all the options that are on the touch panel. The back contains the power slot, printer slot and LAN port for network printer. Overall, the Pixma 8170 sports a neat design but the glossy exterior may spoil the look of the device in just a few days of usage.
The printer has an average waiting time of five seconds if unused for over two minutes, which is not bad at all. To gauge the performance we put it through a few tests. For printing, we put it through four test standards in both fast and high modes - text only, a PDF document with text and images, a complete image printout (on normal and glossy paper) and text with different font sizes. Below are the findings of the tests we carried out.
Post warmup time delay, the text page took ten seconds to print in the fast mode and fifteen seconds in the high mode. The text document with different font sizes took 12 seconds in the fast mode and 17 seconds in the high mode. PDF document printing was a little slow at 46 seconds in the fast mode and 73 seconds in high mode. Photo printing took 122 seconds on normal paper and 135 seconds on glossy paper.
It has a slew of features, the performance was quick, and the experience was seamless as well. Bluetooth is missing and the quality for images could have been a tad better, but the Canon Pixma MG8170 prints at a good speed and print quality is extremely good as well. Add to it the user interface and it makes printing an enjoyable experience. If budget is not a criteria, then the Pixma MG8170 is definitely a good buy.