The Effects page lets turns your photo into a simulated color illustration, slide the lever to increase or decrease the effect. You can also create a monochrome effect like Sepia, Pink, Blue, Green or select a custom color. The Vivid Photo option enhances the green and blue colors and contrast and may be too much for some images. You can also enable or disable the Image Optimizer or Photo Optimizer PRO enhancements which help produce better enlargements from lower resolution images. The Photo Noise Reduction option helps reduce speckle noise often found in blue areas such as the sky. It has two settings: Normal and Strong.

The Profiles page lets you load, create or save custom sets of printer parameters for the type of printing jobs that you do frequently.

The Maintenance page lets you clean the print heads with options for a regular cleaning cycle or a "deep" cleaning cycle for really clogged heads. Because of the lower paper cassette, the MP960 also has a Bottom Plate Cleaning option. There is also an option for aligning the heads or checking the print nozzles. You can also set the Auto Power Off time, Custom Settings and the Quiet Mode. From here you can also start the Status Monitor (see next frame.)

The Status Monitor shows you visibly the level of ink in each of the ink tanks. When one of the tanks is low the Status Monitor will pop-up to alert you. The low tank(s) will have a yellow exclamation mark over it to let you know that it needs to be replaced soon. The ink warning first comes on when there is still some ink remaining so you won't run out in the middle of a printout and waste a sheet of costly photo paper.

When printing from the computer I always enable the Preview option (found on the Main driver page), this is displayed just before the printer begins to actually print. Here you can visually verify your image cropping, orientation, paper size, media type, paper source and the printing type (borderless / bordered) -- before accidentally wasting a sheet of expensive photo paper because a driver setting was incorrect.

Steve's Conclusion

The PIXMA MP960 Photo All-in-One "one ups" the other multipurpose printer/scanner devices as it can also scan and print from 35mm slides and film strips. It's a flatbed scanner, a one-page color copier and a high quality photo printer. You can make digital prints directly from flash memory cards, PictBridge-enabled digital cameras or from a computer. The one thing it doesn't do is transmit and receive faxes, for that you'll need the Canon PIXMA MP830. The MP960 features Canon's high resolution FINE print head and seven individually replaceable ink tanks - it's an economical and fast photo inkjet printer with exceptional print quality. It's also a very speedy all-purpose printer with both a top sheet feeder and a bottom paper cassette.

Printing from a flash memory card is quick and easy. Just insert the card, view and select the pictures on the large 3.5-inch color LCD, set your printing preferences and print - it's just that simple. You can crop photos before printing if desired, just select the Trimming option and follow the on-screen prompts. It has options for brightening faces, removing red-eye, vivid colors and noise reduction. Printing directly from memory cards is as fast as printing from a computer. That says a lot for the MP960's internal processing power, previous devices often took 2-3 times longer to print from cards than from a computer.

SOHO (Small Office Home Office) users will appreciate the MP960's capability to make quick color or B/W copies. With the supplied software you can scan documents and convert them to the universal Adobe pdf format for storage or transfer by computer. Text documents can be scanned and imported directly into a word processor using the included OCR software. The top lid allows for very thick objects like books to be placed on the scanner just as easily as a single sheet of paper. The CCD-based scanner has a maximum optical resolution of 4,800 x 4,800 dpi and can go as high as 19,200 x 19,200 via interpolation.

The MP960 is not the equal of a $1,500 dedicated film scanner, but considering its lower cost and greater versatility, you'll find it more than adequate. Would you like to digitize that old slide collection that you've got gathering dust in the closet before they just fade away? The entire process of scanning a slide or negative is made simple with the included ScanGear software. Not only does it scan quickly, it automatically adjusts the color, brightness and contrast.

You'll be more than pleased by the MP960's print quality. The vast majority of today's prints are 4 x 6-inch "jumbo" prints and you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference between those made by the MP960 and those printed on 8-color inkjets or at your local camera shop. Even large, borderless 8.5 x 11-inch prints on Canon Photo Paper Pro look awesome and as you can see from the chart below, this is one speedy printer.

Test print times using a 7-megapixel JPEG image and Canon Photo Paper Pro glossy media. These are actual "click to drop" times meaning the timer starts when we clicked the Print button and stopped when the paper dropped in the tray.

(Pentium P4 / Windows XP computer with USB 2.0 high speed. Olympus SP310 camera used for PictBridge tests.)