Canon Multipass L60 review

Multifunction devices incorporating printer and scanner are all the rage just now, what with the recent release of HP's 1100A (reviewed issue 52, p179) and Brother's HL-P2000 (reviewed issue 52, p177). Canon's MultiPASS L60 also adheres to this trend, except that it is a multifunction device in the original sense of the word, offering an integrated fax as well as laser printer and sheetfed scanner. There's also the option to add a telephone handset, making it a true replacement for standalone office hardware.

The L60 is a solid unit, almost cubic in proportions and fairly compact at 365 « 365 « 242mm (W « D « H). Of course, that's excluding the various plastic supports and widgets that need to be slotted into places, but it's encouraging to see that the support for the vertical main paper input tray is built in and extends to the top of the paper. This means paper won't end up curling around the back after a few weeks - a trait common to so many other printers.

The fax side of the equation is fairly dominant in the L60, with much the same front panel and full array of controls as you'd find on a dedicated machine. You can store faxes in memory rather than transmitting them on the fly, and delay transmission to a preset time too. The front panel controls also take care of the copying functions, and here the presence of the numeric keypad is a boon over the austere fascias of the 1100A and HL-P2000.

Thanks to these controls, you can use the L60 much as you would a standard copier, keying the number of copies directly into the unit rather than having to stand there stabbing the copy button the required number of times. Obviously though, it's still nowhere near as fast as a standalone dedicated copier. It has two modes, Photo and Fine: the Photo mode introduces dithering, while the Fine mode gives higher resolution. Making 25 copies of a single A4 page took four minutes, 43 seconds in Fine mode, and just a few seconds more in Photo. A single sheet will be copied in around 25 seconds and quality is at least as good as a conventional copier.

The L60's print engine is a 600dpi laser rated at six pages per minute. I tested its speed and quality with some of the same tests used for our last laser printer Labs (see issue 49, p116). These consisted of a 15-page plain text document, a five-page business report including several charts and graphs, and a very tough 24-page DTP document incorporating text, graphics and photos. The L60 is only fitted with 1.4Mb of RAM, but it nonetheless managed all the tests without a single indication of memory overruns.

Speed, on the other hand, wasn't outstanding. The unit finished the 15-page text test in two minutes, 51 seconds with the first page appearing after 25 seconds, which equates to a basic print engine speed of 5.75ppm. In contrast the Kyocera FS-3700+, which won the Labs laser Speed award, produced the same document in just one minute, two seconds. The large 24-page DTP document took a long-winded nine minutes, 35 seconds for the MultiPASS to complete, which would have placed it bottom by quite a margin in the Labs test.

It's no speed demon then, but to be fair, Canon doesn't make any claims that it is, and compromises are inevitable in a device of this nature. Print quality was reasonable, particularly when reproducing the varying greys in the graphics of our five-page business document, but there was noticeable stepping in the circular border of pie charts. Photos had rather too much contrast, resulting in white areas rather than subtle light greys, and some banding was in evidence too. Text quality possessed the sharpness and boldness that still distinguishes a laser from any inkjet, but it wasn't the best I've seen, exhibiting very slight coarseness on non-vertical ascenders and descenders when printing italics.