What is the Canon i-SENSYS MF6180dw?
In many offices, the photocopier has morphed into a multifunction printer, which offers direct access from networked PCs and sometimes from wireless devices such as iPads, too. Canon’s i-SENSYS MF6180dw is a small-office device which can handle all the typical paperwork from a workgroup of up to half a dozen people.
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Canon i-SENSYS MF6180dw - Design and Features
The i-SENSYS MF6180dw has a neat, compact look, even though the printer is wide enough that there’s no flare in the casing, to fit the scanner. It’s quite high off the desk, though, more so if you install the optional 500-sheet paper tray.
Without that, the machine still has a 250-sheet main tray and a pull-down, 50-sheet multi-purpose tray. From the top, the printer has a neat Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), which can scan both sides of the document in a single job, though only by auto-feeding the sheet through three times, which is slow.
The full-width control panel has a couple of novel features, with a flip up panel at the extreme left offering seven, single-button quick-dials with the panel down, and a further 12 when you flick it up. At the right hand end are two specialist buttons for scanning documents directly to named PCs.
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Perhaps the most annoying control is the small green standby button, which wakes the machine when it’s in low-power standby mode. Most printers that offer standby power savings are woken by pressing any button on the control panel, which is a lot more convenient. Here, you can only use the standby button.
Canon i-SENSYS MF6180dw - Connections and Installation
There’s a five-line, backlit LCD panel which gives useful feedback and displays menus, though the button to initiate the top level menu uses an unintuitive icon of a head with an asterisk in it. Directly under the control panel is a front panel USB socket so you can print files from and scan files to a USB memory drive.
A single piece drum and toner cartridge slots into the Canon i-SENSYS MF6180dw from the front, once you’ve folded down a section of the front panel. The cartridge is available in two capacities, with a healthy 6,400 pages from the high-yield one.
Software includes Presto! Page Manager and Canon’s own toolbox and management utilities. Wireless setup provides an alternative to USB or 10/100 Ethernet network connections as is simple, via push-button WPS.