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Canon MultiPass F20 Review
January 23, 2003
By Eric Grevstad

A Heavyweight Contender for Light-Duty Deskwork

A Heavyweight Contender for Light-Duty Deskwork

Are ordinary inkjet printers an endangered species? While basic printer prices fall toward the vanishing point (unlike the costs of their refill ink cartridges), multifunction printers that double as desktop copiers and scanners are proliferating. And Canon USA offers families and home offices one of the newest, cutest, and most compact models in the MultiPass F20.

We don't say "one of the cheapest," because Lexmark has driven multifunction prices to as little as $149 with its PrinTrio (reviewed last fall) and the MultiPass F20 costs all of $250. However, that's still far more frugal than buying a printer, flatbed scanner, and copier separately, and the Canon doesn't take nearly as much desk space -- its footprint is about 16 by 22 inches (by 10 inches tall), and connects to your PC with a single USB cable (not included).

Nor is the F20 a bare-bones model, although it has no fax functions and its scanner lacks a document feeder for making copies or optical character recognition (OCR) translations of multipage articles or reports -- you must lift the lid and place pages on the glass one at a time. For one thing, it's a capable personal copier even if your PC's turned off, with a helpful two-line LCD menu and front-panel controls for features ranging from zoom (25 to 400 percent) to two-pages-onto-one-sheet copying (the front-panel LCD prompts you to replace one page with the next before the side-by-side printout).

For another, it doubles as a 2,400 by 1,200 dpi photo printer -- using, it's true, a generic four- instead of finer six-color ink system, but able to produce borderless 4 by 6-inch prints and even print contact sheets or thumbnails of images right from a digital camera's memory card via a PC Card slot and adapter. (A CompactFlash adapter is in the box, along with a coupon to mail in for a free Secure Digital/SmartMedia/Memory Stick adapter.)

Add high-quality if not high-speed printing on plain as well as coated inkjet paper, and you've got an appealing one-piece solution for homes that don't need massive volumes of printing, but need occasional copies of financial statements or scanning of photos into e-mail attachments.

Setup is straightforward -- we liked that the MultiPass' power supply is internal, with just a cord instead of an external power brick to plug into a wall socket -- with a supplied poster guiding you through the job step by step, right down to not connecting the USB cable until after you've installed the printhead and ink cartridges and begun software installation (there's even a clear plastic warning sticker covering the USB connector to hammer the point home).

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