The monochrome laser based MF4690 is the right size for a personal AIO in a home or any size office. At 18.6 by 15.4 by 21.0 inches (HWD) and 31.6 pounds, it's small enough to fit comfortably on a desktop, and it includes a network connector so you can share it easily. It also offers excellent paper handling for light duty printing, with a 250 sheets input tray and a print duplexer.
Rated at 21 pages per minute, it adds a 35 page automatic document feeder (ADF) to its flatbed scanner to handle multi page documents, which makes it even better for office needs. In addition to printing and faxing from a PC, even over a network, the MF4690 works as a standalone copier, fax machine, and email sender.
It scans to PCs only over a USB connection, but it also lets you scan to a USB key, so you can then move the USB key to your computer to copy the file or files to your computer's hard drive. Both scanning to a USB key and sending email directly without using an email program on your PC are relatively rare features. Either by itself would make the MF4690 stand out. Together, they make it potentially quite attractive.
And I haven't even mentioned fax forwarding, which lets you set the MF4690 to forward incoming faxes automatically to an email address as either PDF or TIFF attachments. Unfortunately, as handy as these features are, Canon drops the ball on implementation. To begin with, scanning to a USB key only partly makes up for the lack of ability to scan directly to a PC on a network. It's a welcome convenience, but in many cases, scanning to a PC would be even more convenient.
Rated at 21 pages per minute, it adds a 35 page automatic document feeder (ADF) to its flatbed scanner to handle multi page documents, which makes it even better for office needs. In addition to printing and faxing from a PC, even over a network, the MF4690 works as a standalone copier, fax machine, and email sender.
It scans to PCs only over a USB connection, but it also lets you scan to a USB key, so you can then move the USB key to your computer to copy the file or files to your computer's hard drive. Both scanning to a USB key and sending email directly without using an email program on your PC are relatively rare features. Either by itself would make the MF4690 stand out. Together, they make it potentially quite attractive.
And I haven't even mentioned fax forwarding, which lets you set the MF4690 to forward incoming faxes automatically to an email address as either PDF or TIFF attachments. Unfortunately, as handy as these features are, Canon drops the ball on implementation. To begin with, scanning to a USB key only partly makes up for the lack of ability to scan directly to a PC on a network. It's a welcome convenience, but in many cases, scanning to a PC would be even more convenient.




