Pixma MP160 - is good scanning possible?

[Angilion]

I picked up a Canon Pixma MP160 (from OcUK, of course) for a friend who wanted a decent cheap printer.

It fits the bill. It comes with a black cartridge as well as a colour one, so it isn't really much more expensive than the £20-25 printers I looked at (which didn't include a black cartridge). Print quality and print speed are both surprisingly good for a cheap printer. All as reviews said.

They didn't care about the scanner functionality, so the comments in reviews about the poor quality of it didn't bother me.

I scanned a few things, just as a test. The image quality of the scanning is good enough (at least at the higher dpi setting), but the colour is extremely bad. Scan a vibrant crimson red and you get a muddy dull orange.

Can anything be done about this? If the scanning had been bad in every way, I would probably just have ignored it, but it's just the colour. For black/white/grey stuff, it's not bad.

 

[<F0rb>]

Well for that money, you couldn't have expected much. You said they didn't care about it anyway, so why are you caring ?

 

[Angilion]

It's hardly unusual for someone to want to get the best from something, even if it is a cheap something. It doesn't matter that it isn't mine and I'll never use it.

To explain, as you're confused:

The accuracy of the scanning is not bad.

It's only the colour that's bad.

This means that the scanner is not all bad, not completely rubbish.

I am considering the possibility that something can be done about the colour issue.



It's the incongruity of the extremely poor performance in just colour reproduction in scanning only that makes it stand out for me. It's remarkably good for the money in every other respect, though I see that Canon have made the ink cartridges for it much more expensive than their other cartridges.