Canon imageClass MF455dw Review

The Canon imageClass MF455dw all-in-one printer is the MF450-series AIO that lets you have your four-layer cake (printing, scanning, copying, and faxing) and eat through stacks of paper at high speed, too. Like the MF452dw, which it replaces as our top pick for a heavy-duty laser AIO for a small-to-midsize office or workgroup, it offers all four AIO functions. It also adds the faster speed of the three-function MF453dw, plus the ability to scan in duplex for faxing, a capability the MF452dw limits to copying and scanning. At $369, it costs more than either of its lesser siblings, but in addition to offering the best features of each and more, it also bumps the warranty from one year to three, which alone justifies its higher price.

Its 35.8-pound weight will likely have you seeking some help to take the MF455dw out of its box and move it into place, but otherwise setup is easy. The printer measures 17.8 by 18.3 by 15.4 inches (HWD), which makes it too big to share most desks with, but small enough so finding room for it shouldn't be a problem. Once in place, physical setup otherwise consists of little more than loading paper and connecting cables if you don't want to use Wi-Fi. The toner cartridge ships already loaded in the printer, and needs no preparation before first print.

The supplied driver and software disc includes an installation program that, in my tests, asked which connection to use and which drivers to install, then handled everything else smoothly. The program suggests Canon's proprietary driver as the default, but you can also choose a PCL6 or PostScript driver if your office requires either. For the connection, you can choose among USB, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi.

This model also supports mobile printing, and it lets you call up a QR code on the 5-inch touch-screen control panel for easy Wi-Fi Direct connection. Once connected, printing from my phone and scanning files to it using Canon's app worked as promised. Other touch-screen commands on the printer let you print from or scan to a USB key.

Paper handling is suitable for heavy-duty use by the standards of a small-to-midsize office, as indicated by Canon's recommended duty cycle of 750 to 4,000 pages per month. The base unit offers a 250-sheet drawer, a 100-sheet multipurpose tray, and automatic duplexing—enough for about a week between paper refills at the low end of the range. Adding the $199 optional 550-sheet drawer boosts the total to 900 sheets, or enough capacity for the high end of the range.

Along with a letter-size flatbed for scanning, copying, and faxing, the MF455dw offers a 50-sheet ADF for up to legal size paper. Even better, unlike some mono laser AIOs in this price range—but as with both of its siblings—its ADF duplexes, meaning that it scans both sides at once, as opposed to a reversing ADF that scans one side, then turns the page over to scan the other. This more than doubles the scan speed for duplex documents compared with a reversing ADF that offers the same speed for single-sided scanning. Keep in mind also that even in this price range, some AIOs are limited strictly to one-sided scanning, lacking the software or firmware needed to let you flip a stack of pages over manually, scan the second side, and automatically interfile pages in the right order.

The MF455dw shares the same low running cost as its siblings, at 2.25 cents per page, using a cartridge that includes the drum as well as toner. If you compare its running costs to a competitor that sells toner separately from the imaging units, make sure to include the other printer's added per page cost for the imaging unit in your calculation. Keep in mind also that total cost of ownership—the initial price plus the running cost—is the comparison that matters most, as we discuss in our guide to how to save money on your next printer. (The article uses inkjets for its examples, but the same logic works for mono lasers.)

For our performance tests, I connected both the MF455dw and our standard testbed to a network using Ethernet in both cases. As expected, the MF455dw tied the MF453dw, which shares the same 40ppm rating, in printing our 12-page Microsoft Word text file. Both clocked in at 38.8ppm (17 seconds) not including the first page—literally a rounding error short of the rating. In comparison, the Canon MF452dw came in at 34.7 ppm (19 seconds), which is also consistent with its rating. As another point of reference, the Pantum BM5100ADN, which offers a slightly faster rating than the MF453dw, came in a little faster on our tests, at 44ppm (15 seconds), for a mere 4-second difference between first and last place in this group.

Adding back into the equation the time to print the first page changes the order of finish but cuts the range between fastest and slowest to 2 seconds. All three of the Canon printers came in at 7 seconds for their first page out (FPO) times, while the Pantum model took 10 seconds. For the entire file, the speeds work out to 30ppm (24 seconds) for the MF455dw and MF453dw, 28.8ppm (25 seconds) for the BM5100ADN, and 27.8ppm (26 seconds) for the MF452dw. In real-world use, these differences would be impossible to discern.

For our business applications suite, which includes several files of four or fewer pages, and also adds graphics and color to most, the Canon printers' fast FPO times gave all of them an advantage over the Pantum printer. All three were effectively tied, within the error range for the test, for first place. The MF455dw came in at 1 minute and 9 seconds (21.7ppm). The other two each took 1:12 (20.8ppm). The BM5100ADN was slowest, at 1:23 (18.1ppm). On our photo suite, the MF455dw averaged 6 seconds for a 4-by-6-inch photo.

Again, the speed differences in these tests are little enough that for anything short of a 100-page file, they don't matter in any practical sense. But keep in mind that they're for printing on one side of the page. These are usually the only results we report, because adding comments about the speed for duplex printing rarely tells you anything additional about performance. In this case, however, all three of the Canon printers were almost as fast for printing on both sides of the page as on one side.

For our 12-page word file, not including the first sheet (pages 1 and 2), the speed for the MF455dw and MF453dw dropped from 38.8ppm to 37.9ppm, while the MF452dw's speed dropped from 34.7ppm to 34.3ppm—less than a 1ppm difference in each case. The BM5100ADN dropped by a more significant—and much more typical—percentage, going from 44ppm to 24.8ppm. In short, all of the Canon models, but particularly the MF453dw and MF455dw, have a tremendous speed advantage for long text files printed double-sided.

The MF455dw's output quality was as impressive as its speed, with text, graphics, and photos in our tests all solidly in the top tier for a mono laser. Every font you're likely to use in a business document was highly readable, with well-formed characters, even at 4 points. One of two stylized fonts with thick strokes was easily readable at 6 points, and another, which is harder to render well, was easily readable at 8 points.

Solid dark fills in graphics showed uneven pile height, but only when viewed from certain angles, and one hard-to-render gradient verged on looking more like a smudge. This makes it ever-so-slightly inferior to the MF452dw's output quality. However, most fills were suitably even, most gradients changed smoothly, and 1-pixel-wide lines on a black background held up well. With photos on plain paper, I saw some uneven pile height in one photo and subtle dithering in others, but contrast and detail were nevertheless in the top-tier for mono laser output.

The Canon imageClass MF455dw is an easy pick for king of this particular hill. It costs a little more than either of the other Canon models mentioned here, but it offers the same fast speed as the MF453dw, and it outdoes the MF452dw's fax support by adding the ability to scan in duplex for faxing, rather than limiting the feature to copying and scanning.

Compared with the BM5100ADN, the MF455dw is slower for simplex printing and has a higher running cost in theory, but that assumes you can find the Pantum printer's high-capacity cartridge, which is unavailable on Amazon at this writing. Between the two, the MF455dw is also the faster printer by far for duplex printing, and it offers a long list of features the BM5100ADN lacks, starting with Wi-Fi support. All this adds up to the MF455dw offering every feature you're ever likely to need in a mono laser AIO for a small-to-midsize office or workgroup, and also makes it our new Editors' Choice pick for its category.

The imageClass MF455dw laser all-in-one printer delivers everything a small-to-midsize office or workgroup needs: top-tier monochrome print quality, snappy output, and robust paper handling.

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