We thought that printers were supposed to be getting smaller and smaller, but this new MX7600 all-in-one printer from Canon came in a box so big and so heavy, we required the help of Mrs. Gadget to help lift it up the stairs! (We are weak and feeble geeks!)

So once the printer is lifted out of the box and we've recovered from the strain, what do we have? For a start you do get one really fine looking printer, you wouldn't want to hide this away from guests when they came around. Surprisingly for something so heavy, it doesn't actually take up much more space than our previous printer (which we can only surmise was made out of air and fairy dust).

Also, while is is heavy on the arm (around 16kg), it is also heavy in the wallet too. We struggled to find any examples for sale under £200. The price would suggest that this is a printer on the high-end of the all-in-one market. So aside from looks what do you get for your ahrd-earned money?

The printer itself, being an all-in-one boasts a printer, scanner, copier and fax (in fact in our experience when a fax is added the price seems to shoot up for most makes of these devices.). It also features an Ethernet port around the back so it can be networked (sadly no wireless Ethernet - which would make a lot of sense in home office environments nowadays).

The MX7600 claims to print out 28 pages in monochrome a minute while manages a tidy sum of 23 ppm in colour.

Setting up the beast was logical but time-consuming. There are so many bits of tape plastered everywhere in order that the printer arrives at the destination safely that we managed to spend half-an-hour making sure that every bit of extraneous plastic was removed from the printer. It also has six ink cartridges and another for clear ink to install before you can install drivers.

The clear ink would seem a tad unnecessary, after all it's clear - you can't see it. But really this ink is there to make sure the other colours are clearer to see and better looking. Basically, it's there to stop smudging and make everything look crisper.  Of course, when it runs out it's another cartridge to buy.

Once driver installation was sorted out (never an easy task on the Mac, and sadly Canon did not disappoint with the length of time needed to make sure that printer was talking to the Mac) we tested out the printing. We must say that the prints came out looking great, even everyday printing of stuff from Google Maps looked great. The pages weren't too limp and floppy straight out of the printer.

The buttons are well laid out on the main console and there is a slot for a memory card to be inserted(CF, SD, MMC, and Memory Stick all catered for). There is also a PictBridge port on the front of the printer.

The fax, scanning and copy functions works admirably well too. Although the software  extras that came with the printer weren't too impressive (but again we have yet to be impressed by any free software that gets bundled with a printer). This is not to say they were bad bits of software, just not great. Again you get what you pay for.

While the networking functions are welcome, they only drag the printer into nineties. Come on Canon, put out a wireless version. And while you are at it, make the LCD screen a bit bigger, our sights not what it used to be and we can afford laser eye correction.

Overall, the printing is great and the addition of a bigger screen and wireless functionality would make this hard to beat.

Rating: 8/10