Not the best you can find

I recently purchased this multi-function printer and scanner for my parents to use, replacing their HP 1610 which has never had the best scan quality. I found the Canon MP460 on sale on Black Friday and couldn't pass up the deal.

I have had excellent luck with Canon brand scanners in the past and the built-in scanner in the MP460 is just as good as I expected. Since it uses LCD technology, you don't have to wait for the scanner bulb to "warm up" like many competitor's products. The scan software is a little confusing at first -- there are too many buttons you have to push on the Scanner to get things going, and too many options on the computer end to choose from to get a simple scan. Unlike the HP I had used before, it was difficult to set up easy presets that my parents could then select from. The Canon software wanted you to enter the correct settings each and every time, and was very inflexible. You couldn't, for instance, scan directly into iPhoto or another photo manager program. You are instead locked to using the programs that Canon includes in the box if you want to scan automatically into a certain program.

Print quality is nothing to write home about. The unit I bought came with a bad print head, so I could never really test the photo quality as every image came out with white stripes across it, even after aligning and cleaning the cartridges. The black and white text I printed was slightly fuzzy on regular inkjet paper. Overall, I feel like HP has better print quality for normal home and office users.

One of the biggest problems with this little scanner is the TINY color screen that is included. I can see why some people would want a color screen, so they can preview pictures using the memory slots on the front of the printer, but the tiny screen was hard to see unless you were looking DIRECTLY into it, and the writing on the screen was smaller than the writing on any cell phone I've ever used.

It may seem like a good deal, but the Canon Pixima MP460 didn't impress me. If you will be doing a lot of scanning and know what resolution you want, how so save and open files in the program you want, etc. then the included software won't be a pain. However, if you want to set this scanner up with presets and then just use it easily without having to mess with every step of scanning every time, this is not the scanner for you.

Nothing makes this product stick out, in fact the only thing that really sticks out is the giant size of the printer, which doesn't even fit in our printer area on the desk. Make sure to measure where you will be putting this, as it has a large tray on top and on the front that require considerable space.

I would not recommend this product.