Canon MAXIFY MB2160

PRACTICAL AND ECONOMICAL.

THE MAXIFY MB2160 is a solid little workhorse for smaller businesses. We say ‘little’, because it’s more compact than its rivals — a feat it manages by offering only a single 250-sheet paper tray and no rear feed option. It also dispenses with touchscreen operation in favour of a smaller colour LCD and a variety of tactile buttons — a setup we found far more practical than its Canon counterpart’s touchscreen-only system. The accounting department will appreciate the MB2160’s affordable running costs of 12c per black page.

The MB2160 suffers from most of the same setup quirks as the TS9060 — namely poorly-designed setup wizards and questionable use of the English language for some of the instructions — but dialogue boxes for connecting external services have at least have been optimised to fit the 2.5-inch screen. The ‘Cloud’ section of the menu system offers access to Google Drive, Dropbox and Evernote out of the box, but you can register more apps, such as a handful of kid-friendly pages, Instagram, Picasa Web Albums, Twitter and Facebook.

There are a few odd omissions in the MB2160’s functionality: it can’t print borderless 6 x 4 photos, and while two-sided copying is supported through the automatic document feeder, the same can’t be said for two-sided scanning. It’s fairly speedy for printing black pages at 8 pages per minute for black, but colour pages lag at 1.75 pages per minute. The prints are high-quality, with strong colours and smooth text; however, the pages take a while to dry straight out of the printer. Even once dry, the paper remains a little crinkly.