I bought this because I wanted a printer to connect to the network, which was also capable of duplex printing and scanning too (so it can copy a two-sided document and print it two-sided). It does this easily.
The network scanning is not as good as the Kyocera FS-1128MFP because it requires software to be installed on a PC and scans are saved to the PC via the software (if you've used a Canon LiDE USB scanner it's basically the same software as they use), whereas the Kyocera method means that the printer can email PDFs itself or save them to any shared network drive location. The Canon network scanner can only work if a PC is turned on and has the software installed. Having said that, the Kyocera is about twice the price of this Canon.
Scanning is done via presets, either Colour or B&W (and you can set the default resolution and filetype on the PC), or "Custom 1" and "Custom 2" which can be any of colour, B&W or greyscale. That works OK but the "B&W" profile *has* to be B&W, you can't change it to greyscale, and I've not been able to find a way to rename the profiles "Custom 1" and "Custom 2", but once set it's easy to remember.
Only ten PCs can be recognised by the scanner - so when you scan a file and it has to save the file to a PC, you can only choose from a list of upto 10 PCs.
Oddly, the fax cable doesn't include a double adapter or passthrough, so you can't connect the fax machine to a phone socket that already has something connected... I've never seen a fax machine with anything other than a passthrough on the plug end.
Printing is fast, especially the first page out - really really quick - and the software/driver installation is easy enough (though I had to download from the web rather than use the enclosed CD because Windows 7 64-bit didn't like the CD).