The Canon Color imageClass MF641Cw ($299.99) is an entry-level color all-in-one laser printer meant for use in home-based or small offices, or as a personal AIO.
Compared with its competitors, including the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-L3770CDW, the lesser-endowed MF641Cw is a no-frills AIO.
Like most Canon printers, though, this one prints quite well.
However, as the lower-end model of Canon's latest color laser AIO launch, it lacks a few basic productivity and convenience features, such as automatic two-sided printing and an automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending multipage documents to the scanner.
If those perks matter to your small office, it's worth paying $100 more for the MFC-L3770CDW.
Minimizing Manufacturing Costs
Leaving off critical features is frequently a compromise between productivity and cost, designed to make quality laser output more attractive to a broader range of users.
Often, depending on which features wind up left on the chopping block, it also makes for a smaller, lighter machine.
At 14.3 by 16.9 by 15.5 and weighing 39.6 pounds, the MF641Cw is an inch or so smaller in all directions and just less than 10 pounds lighter than its imageClass MF634Cdw sibling.
Some of that difference in size and girth is due to the lack of an ADF and an auto-duplexer.
Also, somewhat bigger and considerably heavier (by almost 15 pounds) is another Daxdi favorite, the Brother MFC-L3770CDW, as is the Epson WF-C5790, an inkjet laser alternative (and another of our top picks).
Notably smaller and about 20 pounds lighter, though, is HP's OfficeJet Pro 9015, also a recent Editors' Choice inkjet AIO designed to serve small offices and work groups.
A primary difference between the MF641Cw and the other models above is that the later all come with ADFs for scanning and copying multipage documents, instead of just a flatbed scanner that requires you to load and scan or copy one page at a time.
Also, all these ADFs support auto-duplexing for scanning two-sided documents without your having to flip the originals to image the second sides—an immense, time-saving convenience if you scan and copy many two-sided multipage documents.
As mentioned, the MF641Cw also cannot print two-sided pages automatically, a standard feature on most printers nowadays, even on much less expensive inkjet models.
To make matters worse, the MF641Cw's driver, the printer's software interface, doesn't support manual duplexing, meaning that it lacks the ability to, while printing the initial set of one-sided pages, keep track of collating data and then prompt you when the time comes to flip the stack to print the other sides.
Printing two-sided pages on the MF641Cw, then, entails a convoluted process of first printing the odd-numbered pages, flipping the stack manually and placing it back in the paper drawer, and then printing the even-numbered pages.
All the other entry-level models discussed here so far support auto-duplex printing.
Where Canon didn't skimp on the MF641Cw, though, is in its gorgeous and comfortably spacious 5-inch color graphics touch screen, shown here.
This easy-to-navigate smartphone-like interface is highly customizable.
It allows you (and your team) to personalize his or her custom layouts to suit individual needs, and you can add apps, or tasks, such as preconfigured workflow presets for, say, printing from or scanning to a specific cloud site, scanning to email, and numerous other automated tasks from Canon's Application Library.
You can also edit existing profiles and create your own.
Most tasks are configurable from the control panel, including managing the Application Library.
More tasks, such as monitoring print jobs and generating, viewing, and printing usage reports, are also available on the MF641Cw's built-in web portal.
The portal is available from just about any browser, including your smartphone, and it allows both admin users and individual user accounts with their own set of permissions.
While most business-oriented printers provide web interfaces, Canon's UI Portal is one of the most comprehensive I've seen.
The MF641Cw's 151-sheet paper input capacity, split between a 150-sheet cassette and a one-sheet override tray for printing one-off envelopes and other media that would require emptying the paper drawer, is typical for an entry-level machine in this class.
The MF634Cdw's paper capacity is the same, and the MFC-L3770CDW's is, at 130 sheets higher, almost twice as much.
The HP 9015 has a 100-sheet higher capacity, and Epson's WF-C5790 holds 180 sheets more, expandable to 830 sheets, than the MF641Cw.
As for the MF641Cw's monthly volume ratings, Canon has stopped publishing maximum monthly duty cycles on its laser printers recently, which, since it represents how hard you can push the machine occasionally, at crunch time, but not necessarily what you can print month in and month out to avoid wearing out the printer, is a misleading spec anyway.
More informative and relevant is the recommended monthly print volume, which on the MF641Cw is 2,500 pages.
That's the same as the MF634Cdw and the WF-C5790 and 1,000 pages fewer than the MFC-L3770CDW and the OfficeJet Pro 9015.
Connectivity and Security
Standard interfaces include Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Ethernet up to 1000Base-T, connecting to a single PC via USB 2.0, and Wi-Fi Direct, for interfacing your mobile devices directly to the printer without an intermediary network connection.
In addition to Wi-Fi Direct, other mobile options include Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Mopria, and the Canon Print Business app, which, among other things, connects your smartphone to Dropbox and Google Drive, though you can access other sites from the MF641Cw's Application Library.
You can also print from and scan to USB thumb drives via the port located on the left side of the chassis, shown here.
Security on the MF641Cw is robust enough to protect a much beefier machine designed for busier settings, instead of the two-to-five users this entry-level AIO is meant to accommodate.
You get, for example, Secure Print, or the ability to lock down sensitive print jobs with personal identification numbers, keeping them away from unauthorized eyes.
You can also manage access to the printer itself, to specific features, and even to varying layers of permissions and functionality on the Web Portal—a feature Canon calls Department IDs.
A "department" can consist of an individual or a group of several users whom you want to have the same restrictions.
You can then restrict how many pages a department can print, how many of those pages can be color or black, and so on.
You can also deny a department access to color printing at all (to save money on toner), as well as restrict it from scanning or copying altogether.
Usually, this level of security and user management is available only on more robust midrange to high-volume machines designed to serve more than a handful of users.
Better for Short Print Jobs
Canon rates the MF641Cw at 18 pages per minute (ppm), the lowest among the AIOs mentioned (although behind its MF634Cdw sibling by just 1ppm).
To assess its performance, I clocked it as it churned through our suite of 26 test document pages over an Ethernet connection from our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.
For the first test, I printed our 12-page Microsoft Word text document several times and averaged the results, coming up with an average score of 19.1ppm, or a bit faster than Canon's rating, and a negligible 0.1ppm faster than the MF634Cdw's score for printing the same pages.
Brother's MFC-L3770CDW was 7.7 pages faster, and Epson's WF-C5790 outpaced the MF641Cw by 5.3ppm, while HP's 9015 was 2.9ppm faster.
See How We Test Printers
The next portion of our benchmarking regimen entails printing an assortment of 14 full-color Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint documents and handouts made up of intricate charts, graphs, and other types of complex business graphics, as well as several typefaces set in various colors, weights, and sizes, including a few decorative fonts.
Then, I combined the results from these tests with those from the previous 12-page text document and calculated a score of 11.5ppm for printing our entire suite of business test documents.
The MF634Cdw churned at 0.9ppm slower on this part of our test, and the MFC-L3770CDW fell behind by 1.2ppm.
The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015 inkjet beat the MF641Cw by a respectable 5ppm, and the Epson WF-C5790's 17.7ppm left them all, inkjet and laser alike, eating its dust.
Finally, to test the MF641Cw's photo printing prowess, I ran our highly detailed and colorful 4-by-6-inch test snapshots through it several times and came up with an average print time of 13 seconds.
That's about average for a color laser printer, as well as the other machines mentioned here.
Near-Perfect Imaging
Canon is, of course, in all aspects of photography and printing, an imaging giant; it's been a long time since I've come across one of its printers that didn't churn out respectable output.
Nothing's perfect, though, and I did find some minor, but not deal-breaking, flaws, in our business graphics containing dark gradients and dark solid fill backgrounds.
But this light banding was not unsightly nor was it prominent enough to distract me from the content, or message, contained within the one Excel chart and two PowerPoint handouts where I found them.
In fact, on all but one of the three affected pages, it wasn't until I held them up and looked specifically for flaws that I found the banding.
The text on our test font pages came out well-shaped and highly legible, near-typesetter quality down to about 6 points, where I needed my reading glasses to see them.
Photos came out highly detailed with vibrant colors; though not quite up to the quality you'd see from Canon's and Epson's more expensive five- and six-ink consumer-grade photo printers.
Even so, I'd have no qualms using the MF641Cw's photos for distributing real estate marketing or other product photos.
Low-Volume Running Costs
Compared with many of its laser-based competitors, such as the Canon MF634Cdw and the Brother MFC-L3770CDW, the MF641Cw's running costs of 3 cents for monochrome pages and 15.3 cents for color seem reasonable.
The MF641Cw's MF634Cdw sibling, a somewhat more capable machine in terms of convenience and productivity features, delivers, at 3.2 cents for black pages and 16.4 cents for color, slightly higher per-page costs, while the Brother MFC-L3770CDW, at 2.6 cents monochrome and 15.5 cents color, prints less-expensive black pages and like-priced color pages.
To get significantly lower running costs on a laser printer, you can go with a higher-volume (and more expensive) model, such as Brother's MFC-L8900CDW (1.9 cents black and 10.6 cents color), or you can choose an inkjet laser alternative, such as the Epson WF-5790 (1.7 cents monochrome and 7.7 cents color).
Also, there are other cost-saving benefits from inkjet technology, including much lower power consumption versus their laser counterparts.
For more on how to save money on ink, check out our full explainer.
Knowing the Limits
When you come across similar machines with incrementally graduating prices, it's important to investigate why one machine costs less than the other, and this is especially true with printers.
For the $100 difference between the MF641Cw and the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-L3770CDW, for example, you give up a lot of time-saving, critical features, including auto duplexing, an ADF, and even manual duplexing.
Even so, the budget-priced, no-frills MF641Cw is capable of churning out good-looking no-nonsense one-sided prints and copies for individuals and home-based and small offices that might not otherwise be able to afford an entry-level color laser AIO.
Just make sure you know what saving that $100 will cost you in the long run.
Canon Color ImageClass MF641Cw
Cons
No automatic document feeder.
Lacks automatic two-sided printing.
Comparatively low print volume.
The Bottom Line
The Canon Color ImageClass MF641Cw prints well, but it lacks a few basic productivity features, relegating this all-in-one printer to low-volume environments.
The Canon Color imageClass MF641Cw ($299.99) is an entry-level color all-in-one laser printer meant for use in home-based or small offices, or as a personal AIO.
Compared with its competitors, including the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-L3770CDW, the lesser-endowed MF641Cw is a no-frills AIO.
Like most Canon printers, though, this one prints quite well.
However, as the lower-end model of Canon's latest color laser AIO launch, it lacks a few basic productivity and convenience features, such as automatic two-sided printing and an automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending multipage documents to the scanner.
If those perks matter to your small office, it's worth paying $100 more for the MFC-L3770CDW.
Minimizing Manufacturing Costs
Leaving off critical features is frequently a compromise between productivity and cost, designed to make quality laser output more attractive to a broader range of users.
Often, depending on which features wind up left on the chopping block, it also makes for a smaller, lighter machine.
At 14.3 by 16.9 by 15.5 and weighing 39.6 pounds, the MF641Cw is an inch or so smaller in all directions and just less than 10 pounds lighter than its imageClass MF634Cdw sibling.
Some of that difference in size and girth is due to the lack of an ADF and an auto-duplexer.
Also, somewhat bigger and considerably heavier (by almost 15 pounds) is another Daxdi favorite, the Brother MFC-L3770CDW, as is the Epson WF-C5790, an inkjet laser alternative (and another of our top picks).
Notably smaller and about 20 pounds lighter, though, is HP's OfficeJet Pro 9015, also a recent Editors' Choice inkjet AIO designed to serve small offices and work groups.
A primary difference between the MF641Cw and the other models above is that the later all come with ADFs for scanning and copying multipage documents, instead of just a flatbed scanner that requires you to load and scan or copy one page at a time.
Also, all these ADFs support auto-duplexing for scanning two-sided documents without your having to flip the originals to image the second sides—an immense, time-saving convenience if you scan and copy many two-sided multipage documents.
As mentioned, the MF641Cw also cannot print two-sided pages automatically, a standard feature on most printers nowadays, even on much less expensive inkjet models.
To make matters worse, the MF641Cw's driver, the printer's software interface, doesn't support manual duplexing, meaning that it lacks the ability to, while printing the initial set of one-sided pages, keep track of collating data and then prompt you when the time comes to flip the stack to print the other sides.
Printing two-sided pages on the MF641Cw, then, entails a convoluted process of first printing the odd-numbered pages, flipping the stack manually and placing it back in the paper drawer, and then printing the even-numbered pages.
All the other entry-level models discussed here so far support auto-duplex printing.
Where Canon didn't skimp on the MF641Cw, though, is in its gorgeous and comfortably spacious 5-inch color graphics touch screen, shown here.
This easy-to-navigate smartphone-like interface is highly customizable.
It allows you (and your team) to personalize his or her custom layouts to suit individual needs, and you can add apps, or tasks, such as preconfigured workflow presets for, say, printing from or scanning to a specific cloud site, scanning to email, and numerous other automated tasks from Canon's Application Library.
You can also edit existing profiles and create your own.
Most tasks are configurable from the control panel, including managing the Application Library.
More tasks, such as monitoring print jobs and generating, viewing, and printing usage reports, are also available on the MF641Cw's built-in web portal.
The portal is available from just about any browser, including your smartphone, and it allows both admin users and individual user accounts with their own set of permissions.
While most business-oriented printers provide web interfaces, Canon's UI Portal is one of the most comprehensive I've seen.
The MF641Cw's 151-sheet paper input capacity, split between a 150-sheet cassette and a one-sheet override tray for printing one-off envelopes and other media that would require emptying the paper drawer, is typical for an entry-level machine in this class.
The MF634Cdw's paper capacity is the same, and the MFC-L3770CDW's is, at 130 sheets higher, almost twice as much.
The HP 9015 has a 100-sheet higher capacity, and Epson's WF-C5790 holds 180 sheets more, expandable to 830 sheets, than the MF641Cw.
As for the MF641Cw's monthly volume ratings, Canon has stopped publishing maximum monthly duty cycles on its laser printers recently, which, since it represents how hard you can push the machine occasionally, at crunch time, but not necessarily what you can print month in and month out to avoid wearing out the printer, is a misleading spec anyway.
More informative and relevant is the recommended monthly print volume, which on the MF641Cw is 2,500 pages.
That's the same as the MF634Cdw and the WF-C5790 and 1,000 pages fewer than the MFC-L3770CDW and the OfficeJet Pro 9015.
Connectivity and Security
Standard interfaces include Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Ethernet up to 1000Base-T, connecting to a single PC via USB 2.0, and Wi-Fi Direct, for interfacing your mobile devices directly to the printer without an intermediary network connection.
In addition to Wi-Fi Direct, other mobile options include Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Mopria, and the Canon Print Business app, which, among other things, connects your smartphone to Dropbox and Google Drive, though you can access other sites from the MF641Cw's Application Library.
You can also print from and scan to USB thumb drives via the port located on the left side of the chassis, shown here.
Security on the MF641Cw is robust enough to protect a much beefier machine designed for busier settings, instead of the two-to-five users this entry-level AIO is meant to accommodate.
You get, for example, Secure Print, or the ability to lock down sensitive print jobs with personal identification numbers, keeping them away from unauthorized eyes.
You can also manage access to the printer itself, to specific features, and even to varying layers of permissions and functionality on the Web Portal—a feature Canon calls Department IDs.
A "department" can consist of an individual or a group of several users whom you want to have the same restrictions.
You can then restrict how many pages a department can print, how many of those pages can be color or black, and so on.
You can also deny a department access to color printing at all (to save money on toner), as well as restrict it from scanning or copying altogether.
Usually, this level of security and user management is available only on more robust midrange to high-volume machines designed to serve more than a handful of users.
Better for Short Print Jobs
Canon rates the MF641Cw at 18 pages per minute (ppm), the lowest among the AIOs mentioned (although behind its MF634Cdw sibling by just 1ppm).
To assess its performance, I clocked it as it churned through our suite of 26 test document pages over an Ethernet connection from our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.
For the first test, I printed our 12-page Microsoft Word text document several times and averaged the results, coming up with an average score of 19.1ppm, or a bit faster than Canon's rating, and a negligible 0.1ppm faster than the MF634Cdw's score for printing the same pages.
Brother's MFC-L3770CDW was 7.7 pages faster, and Epson's WF-C5790 outpaced the MF641Cw by 5.3ppm, while HP's 9015 was 2.9ppm faster.
See How We Test Printers
The next portion of our benchmarking regimen entails printing an assortment of 14 full-color Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint documents and handouts made up of intricate charts, graphs, and other types of complex business graphics, as well as several typefaces set in various colors, weights, and sizes, including a few decorative fonts.
Then, I combined the results from these tests with those from the previous 12-page text document and calculated a score of 11.5ppm for printing our entire suite of business test documents.
The MF634Cdw churned at 0.9ppm slower on this part of our test, and the MFC-L3770CDW fell behind by 1.2ppm.
The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015 inkjet beat the MF641Cw by a respectable 5ppm, and the Epson WF-C5790's 17.7ppm left them all, inkjet and laser alike, eating its dust.
Finally, to test the MF641Cw's photo printing prowess, I ran our highly detailed and colorful 4-by-6-inch test snapshots through it several times and came up with an average print time of 13 seconds.
That's about average for a color laser printer, as well as the other machines mentioned here.
Near-Perfect Imaging
Canon is, of course, in all aspects of photography and printing, an imaging giant; it's been a long time since I've come across one of its printers that didn't churn out respectable output.
Nothing's perfect, though, and I did find some minor, but not deal-breaking, flaws, in our business graphics containing dark gradients and dark solid fill backgrounds.
But this light banding was not unsightly nor was it prominent enough to distract me from the content, or message, contained within the one Excel chart and two PowerPoint handouts where I found them.
In fact, on all but one of the three affected pages, it wasn't until I held them up and looked specifically for flaws that I found the banding.
The text on our test font pages came out well-shaped and highly legible, near-typesetter quality down to about 6 points, where I needed my reading glasses to see them.
Photos came out highly detailed with vibrant colors; though not quite up to the quality you'd see from Canon's and Epson's more expensive five- and six-ink consumer-grade photo printers.
Even so, I'd have no qualms using the MF641Cw's photos for distributing real estate marketing or other product photos.
Low-Volume Running Costs
Compared with many of its laser-based competitors, such as the Canon MF634Cdw and the Brother MFC-L3770CDW, the MF641Cw's running costs of 3 cents for monochrome pages and 15.3 cents for color seem reasonable.
The MF641Cw's MF634Cdw sibling, a somewhat more capable machine in terms of convenience and productivity features, delivers, at 3.2 cents for black pages and 16.4 cents for color, slightly higher per-page costs, while the Brother MFC-L3770CDW, at 2.6 cents monochrome and 15.5 cents color, prints less-expensive black pages and like-priced color pages.
To get significantly lower running costs on a laser printer, you can go with a higher-volume (and more expensive) model, such as Brother's MFC-L8900CDW (1.9 cents black and 10.6 cents color), or you can choose an inkjet laser alternative, such as the Epson WF-5790 (1.7 cents monochrome and 7.7 cents color).
Also, there are other cost-saving benefits from inkjet technology, including much lower power consumption versus their laser counterparts.
For more on how to save money on ink, check out our full explainer.
Knowing the Limits
When you come across similar machines with incrementally graduating prices, it's important to investigate why one machine costs less than the other, and this is especially true with printers.
For the $100 difference between the MF641Cw and the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-L3770CDW, for example, you give up a lot of time-saving, critical features, including auto duplexing, an ADF, and even manual duplexing.
Even so, the budget-priced, no-frills MF641Cw is capable of churning out good-looking no-nonsense one-sided prints and copies for individuals and home-based and small offices that might not otherwise be able to afford an entry-level color laser AIO.
Just make sure you know what saving that $100 will cost you in the long run.
Canon Color ImageClass MF641Cw
Cons
No automatic document feeder.
Lacks automatic two-sided printing.
Comparatively low print volume.
The Bottom Line
The Canon Color ImageClass MF641Cw prints well, but it lacks a few basic productivity features, relegating this all-in-one printer to low-volume environments.
