Home offices and small businesses in search of entry to mid-range color laser MFP may wish to consider one of the newest devices in Canon’s ever-popular imageCLASS line. Originally announced with many other printers back in September, the Color imageCLASS MF726Cdw is a 4-in-1 color laser allowing users to print, scan, copy, and fax from a single machine. It offers reasonably quick print speeds of up to 21 ISO ppm for both black and color output. The device has a semi-large footprint of 17" x 19.2" x 18.9" (W x D x H) though it weighs a very hefty 68.3lbs. with the cartridges installed. A nice feature users will likely pick up on right off the bat is the large, 7-line QVGA color touch screen that allows for easy and intuitive navigation of machine menus and functions.
As it is meant to be a unit well-designed for the needs of small businesses and home offices, it is replete with options for both wireless and mobile printing. Standard interfaces include USB 2.0, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi for printer on a home network or as a standalone unit. These standard features are useful, however the real value in the machine comes from its variety of mobile printing options. The Color imageCLASS MF726Cdw supports Wi-Fi Direct printing so that mobile devices can be connected directly to it without needing a router. Additionally, users can pair their NFC-enabled devices to the printer by simply tapping them to authenticate and queue print jobs. Among the mobile services supported by the unit are Apple AirPrint™, Mopria™ Print Service, and Google Cloud Print. In terms of native solutions, there is the Canon PRINT Business app that works on iOS and Android devices. This allows for advanced scanning and printing between mobile devices and imageCLASS units as well as cloud access to iCloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox files.
As this is a unit designed for business use, there are also several great paper handling features built-in. The standard input capacity is 300 sheets split between a 250-sheet main cassette and 50-sheet multipurpose tray. For users that need more capacity, they can opt to add an additional 250-sheet capacity cassette ($199.00) bringing the overall input capacity to 550 sheets. Automatic two-sided printing is also a standard features as well as double-sided scanning, faxing, and copying made possible through the 50-sheet capacity automatic document feeder. For built-in security, users and companies have the option of storing up to 300 unique IDs for device and user management. Secure Print is also an option for businesses that need it. The maximum monthly duty cycle on the Color imageCLASS MF726Cdw is 40,000 pages.
In terms of the toner setup, this Canon unit takes four individual toner cartridges: black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Each of the cartridges comes in one size only, thought the capacity on each is fairly substantial with 3,400 pages for black, and up to 2,900 pages for each color.
The Canon Color imageCLASS MF726Cdw is available from the company for $439.20, or from Amazon with the link above for under $400. For more information on the unit, visit the product page on the Canon website.