The Canon i-SENSYS MF742Cdw is a classic all-rounder suited to meet the needs of a busy office.
With the Canon i-SENSYS MF742Cdw, you’re getting a lot of laser printer for your money. As multifunction printer’s go, it’s a rather handsome three-in-one device offering colour printing, scanning and copying. If you still need a fax, you should be looking at the almost identical i-SENSYS MF744Cdw. There’s also a fifty-sheet ADF (automatic document feeder), inbuilt Wi-Fi and a generous touchscreen interface. Like Canon’s other i-SENSYS printers, you can add a 550-sheet paper tray if needed and the high-yield toner cartridges available promise an economical per-page print cost. Perhaps most attractive is the price. At around £385 (about US$504, AU$709), it’s appreciably cheaper than the old i-SENSYS model it succeeds and it ships with enough toner to print 2,300 black and white pages, or 1,200 in colour. The Canon i-SENSYS MF742Cdw is not particularly compact, but the crisp black and off-white design is not unattractive and it feels very well put together. You probably won’t want it to perch on the same desk you work on, but it’ll stand neatly enough on its own table. The capacity of the main paper tray is not particularly impressive at 250-sheets, but you can add an accessory costing around £160 (about US$209) that will boost the paper capacity by another 550 sheets. It takes the usual form factor for a multifunction device with the A4-sized scanner bed positioned above the printer and on top of this is the 50-sheet ADF. The 50-sheet multi-purpose tray folds out from the front of the printer offering a convenient way of printing onto envelopes and headed letter paper. To access the four toner cartridges, the entire front panel opens up. This printer’s most prominent feature is the large 12.7cm tilting colour touchscreen. The tablet-style interface allows gestures like swiping to access the three-pages of on-screen icons and though it’s nowhere near as sensitive as a smartphone, it is much more user-friendly than the old hard button control panels you still find on many similarly priced peripherals. On the left side of the printer, barely visible against the black plastic, is a USB host port for walk-up printing from a thumb drive, which is always a welcome addition on a business printer.
