Which toner fits the Canon i-SENSYS MF461dw?

Two trays, two weight limits

This machine has two paper paths and they do not take the same thickness. The 250-sheet cassette tops out at 120 gsm; the 100-sheet multi-purpose tray goes up to 199 gsm.

The distinction is not administrative. Paper that is too heavy fed through the cassette follows a more curved path and goes through the fuser in poorer conditions: the toner bonds badly, and the print marks under a finger or flakes at the fold. Nine times out of ten that fault is blamed on the cartridge, when loading card and covers into the multi-purpose tray was all that was needed. A new cartridge will correct nothing.

070 or 070H: the arithmetic

Canon recommends a volume of 750 to 4,000 pages a month. At the ceiling, the 070 lasts twenty-two days and the 070H two and a half months. The gap between the two capacities is 3.4 — wide — and both cartridges are fitted the same way.

On an office machine connected to the network, the 070H is nearly always the right choice: what you save is not only orders, it is work interrupted at the wrong moment for several people. The same reasoning holds for colour i-SENSYS models such as the MF655Cdw, except that there it applies mainly to the black.

What the feeder changes, and what it does not

The MF461dw scans both sides in a single pass of the feeder, at 36 pages per minute double-sided. Scanning uses nothing: the page is read, not printed. Copying, though, uses exactly as much as printing — and an efficient feeder makes copy runs so easy that they become the office's leading source of spending.

A 12.7 cm colour touchscreen, Wi-Fi and Ethernet, automatic duplex printing, a maximum cycle of 80,000 pages a month.