Canon i-SENSYS MF8580Cdw review

Canon’s i-SENSYS MF8580Cdw isn’t the largest colour laser multifunction peripheral (MFP), but it’s fairly tall off the desk. It’s a smart modern design, with a control panel that wraps around from the right-hand side panel, but there’s no attempt to hide its 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) under a dust cover. It can scan both sides of a sheet of paper automatically (duplex), and the printer can print in the same fashion, so giving you duplex prints, scans, copies and faxes. There’s support for wired and wireless networks, Google Cloud print, Apple iPrint, and more comprehensive Android and iOS capability through separate print and scanning apps.

Although they look quite different, this MFP has a lot in common with HP’s LaserJet Pro M476dn; both share a similar print engine, similar overall specifications, and take similar consumables, although these aren’t interchangeable between the two printers. It’s surprising, then, that this MFP costs a third more than HP’s version: although the HP printer doesn’t support Wi-Fi, it does have a colour touchscreen to this MFP’s mono display and conventional buttons. In common with other Canon laser devices we’ve reviewed recently, many of the MF8580Cdw’s icons are unfathomable: HP’s control system is far superior.

We were surprised by how flimsy the main 250-sheet paper tray feels on this MFP, particularly around its thin front panel. The correct paper orientation is stamped in the base of the paper tray, but this is covered up as soon as you add paper. The 50-sheet multipurpose feed above the main paper tray also feels a bit flexible, but when the feed is open it rests on the flap that covers it when it’s closed, lending it some extra strength. At least the paper and envelope orientation is marked in two places, and we printed a perfect, uncrumpled envelope on our first attempt.

Although this MFP’s control panel can’t be tilted through different angles, the scanner bed that it’s part of rotates on heavily damped hinges to provide better access to the printer’s output tray below. The cramped output tray doesn’t look especially convincing, but it keeps printed pages tidy, and we appreciated the scooped-out area designed to help you collect paper more easily. During printing there are no harsh noises, but by default there’s a beep at the end of every job – particularly annoying in our 25-page text test, which comprises 25 copies of a single page.

After inserting a USB flash drive in the port under the control panel, we found it simple to make basic direct scans, although we were disappointed that this wasn’t possible while the MF8580Cdw was printing another job. We found direct printing more frustrating, however, as the menu initially offered an index print before saying that no content was found on the inserted disk. We had the same problem when trying to navigate to specific files on the disk which the screen simply didn’t show, before discovering that PDF files are not supported. This seems like a fairly major omission, but we copied a JPEG picture to the disk, tried again and found it easy to print. 

At this price, Canon’s stated speed of 20 pages per minute (ppm) in black or colour isn’t especially impressive, but the MF8580Cdw isn’t too sluggish in practice. It produced our black text test at 16.5ppm, and our more complex colour graphics test at 14.7ppm, which is quite a quick result. We were happy with its very sharp black text, and reasonably so with its colour graphics, although these appeared grainy in places. Colour photos were a touch too warm and vivid for our liking, and we couldn’t find a setting to get them just as we wanted. By contrast, our black-and-white test photo printed with a subtle blue-green tone, but was completely neutral when printed via the USB host port.

A pictorial in the Android app suggests that jobs are sent to the printer via the Cloud, even when MFP and phone are on the same network. We’re not sure if this is the case, but the printer was incredibly slow to start printing our test job; so much so that in the meantime we’d assumed it had failed and had moved on to some other tests.

Canon’s PC scan interface is one of our favourites, and here it makes scanning a simple affair, while providing advanced options for those who want them; the software is massively better than HP’s equivalent. One foible of this MFP is that you must use the control panel on the device to place it in remote scanner mode when you want to scan either from PC software or a mobile app; it’s a frustration if you forget to do this when placing the original document. Scans were very quick up to the 600 dots per inch (dpi) maximum. Although it’s unusual for a scanner in this class to not support 1,200dpi, our results were much better than typical for a laser MFP, with a particularly high dynamic range preserving detail from among the lightest and darkest shades.

This printer takes just four consumables, all held in a drawer which pulls out easily, but they’re available only with a modest 3,400-page capacity. Using these, running costs work out at 9.9p for a black and colour page, which isn’t cheap, and the black component of this is a particularly high 2.2p. Although we don’t usually include multi-pack pricing in our running cost calculations, the black toner is available in a twin pack, which reduces black costs to 1.7p per page. Even so, despite its strengths, this MFP still isn’t particularly good value to buy or run.