Canon imageCLASS MF3240 All-in-One Laser Printer Review

In today’s product review we’ll be taking a look at the Canon imageCLASS MF3240 All-in-One Laser Printer. There are some good deals floating around right now for this printer. I got a chance to check out this printer recently (a returned refurbished one awaiting repackaging). I’ve liked Canon Pixma inkjets I’ve tried but does this inexpensive Canon all-in-one laser impress or depress…

Review Continued Below…

The all-in-one functions that the Canon MF3240 has are printer, scanner, copier and fax and obviously targeted toward the home office environment. The printing in monochrome so if you need color printing for photos and such this isn’t the printer for you. The scanner is flatbed and the printer comes with ScanSoft OmniPage OCR software. Yes, although the printer is monochrome the scanner supports 24-bit color. The fax is, well, a standard fax. The printer works with Windows, including Vista. I couldn’t find any mention of this printer being supported for Macs.

Printing is good, but not great, on the MF3240. I found it a bit slower than the Oki laser I tested out recently and the print quality to be less precise, especially on PowerPoint graphics print outs. If you’re printing out pure text though it does fine. It does not support double sided printing which is a bit disappointing but kind of expected in this price range for laser printers. Warm up time was reasonable and it wasn’t overly noisy during operation.

The scanning with the Canon MF3240 is good and compares well to other all-in-one scanners I’ve tried in this price range. The OCR software works nicely. Copying documents also worked well and was easy enough to use. I didn’t test the faxing but it seems like working this would be straight forward too.

The durability of the Canon imageCLASS MF3240 is something I would worry a bit about. This printer, like many other inexpensive all-in-ones I’ve used, felt flimsy. I think it would hold up OK in a light duty home office environment but I think you should look elsewhere for a standard duty office printer. Cartridges run about $20-30 each, and, from what I understand, toner can be refilled. They should last about 2500 pages.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the Canon MF3240 is the lack of an automatic document feeder for the copier/fax/scan. This limits its usefulness for copying and faxing multi-page documents as well as OCR-ing documents since you have to place each sheet individually on the scanning bed. If you only occasionally do copying, faxing or OCR this may not be a problem for you but, if you do, this might be a negative for you.

The bottom line on the Canon imageCLASS MF3240 All-in-One Laser Printer is that its a decent mono laser all-in-one printer that you should be buy for less than $100 if you shop around and wait for the right deal. Just remember that buying a unit at such a low price comes with some significant trade-offs in terms of functionality and long term durability.

Product Review
All-in-One, Canon, imageCLASS, Laser Printer, MF3240, Review