Good MFP for a managed environment: Canon Imageclass MF729Cx

Creating better paper pickup or roller designs and more efficient toners are some of the areas printer makers are focusing on improving. The MF729Cx is no exception to this trend, and its headline “on-demand fixing” tech, simply put, is what enables the printer’s 20ppm print speeds. It also reduces energy use and improves the printer’s general responsiveness, which is immediately obvious from a quick 23-second warm-up and 14.5-second first printout timings.

Portrait of Tammy Strobel
My Reading Room

Creating better paper pickup or roller designs and more efficient toners are some of the areas printer makers are focusing on improving. The MF729Cx is no exception to this trend, and its headline “on-demand fixing” tech, simply put, is what enables the printer’s 20ppm print speeds. It also reduces energy use and improves the printer’s general responsiveness, which is immediately obvious from a quick 23-second warm-up and 14.5-second first printout timings.

In addition to Canon’s UFR II LT print language, the MF729Cx is compatible with the more standard PCL protocol as well as PostScript 3. The main paper tray accepts 250 sheets but you can add another to bring total capacity to 550 sheets. I like that you can easily scan to PC, USB host or network, and that there’s built-in support for wired and wireless networking. There’s also a 50-sheet duplex ADF for more efficient two-sided scanning.

All these old-school features blend in well with modern features like NFC support, a free app for mobile printing and scanning, and a generous 3.5-inch color touchscreen that lets you position your favorite settings as shortcuts. With onboard secure printing and the ability to integrate with Uniflow (Canon’s print and scan management platform), the MF729Cx fits well in a managed print environment, too.

Excluding processing time, the MF729Cx’s print speeds match up to Canon’s claims: I got 20.5ppm, be it mono or color printing. For what it’s worth, it took roughly 30 seconds (starting from the moment I hit the Print button on my Intel Core-quipped Windows test machine) to spit out a 4-page Word document. And replicating the same document with the copier took 38 seconds.

The quality of black text from the MF729Cx is excellent: dark, crisp, and with nary a fill problem. Graphics output is good too, with vivid colors and only very minute dithering steps. I noted some banding in photos, but that’s really par for the course for laser printers. For most business documents, I think the default 600 x 600 dpi print resolution should suffice.

Canon has struck a good balance of performance and features with the Imageclass MF729Cx. If your print rate is a couple of thousand of pages a month, it’s well worth your consideration.

Conclusion
Print speed isn’t the fastest in class, but output quality is excellent and it has a very useful DADF.

AT A GLANCE
Function: Print, scan, copy, fax
A4 print speed: 20ppm (mono/color)
Connectivity: USB 2.0, Ethernet, wireless, NFC
Power: 300mw into 16 Ohm
Price: $699

As with most MFps in this class, it can read and print documents residing on USB flash media.
As with most MFps in this class, it can read and print documents residing on USB flash media.
My Reading Room

Text: Ng Chong Seng  / Pictures: Canon

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