Customer Reviews

Canon PIXMA iP4200 Photo Printer

5 star:		(77)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

I was a loyal Epson customer for years until my most recent purchase from them let me down.

I researched what my next purchase would be, and was leaning towards the highly rated ip4000. I found that the ip4200 was out, but could not find any reviews whatsoever until I read the first review posted on this site. (As I learned via Epson, newer is not always better). I decided to take the chance, and I bought the ip4200.

It is a fantastic printer. The quality of print for both documents and photographs is beyond belief. I love the design, the ease of installation, and the user-friendly functions. It is also a very quiet printer. The documentation is very thorough. As far as not coming with a USB cable, it was no big deal. I just used the one from the old printer. If this is your first USB 2.0, then I can see that lack of a cable as being annoying.

One small thing I also found impressive is that Canon does not push their own papers on you. There are no statements implying that other papers would somehow harm the printer like some other manufacturers do with their printers. The manual even mentions that using general copy paper is fine. This is a very small thing, but it does stand out. (They do, of course, give a list of all their own papers, but they do need to make a profit too! lol)

Overall, I think that this is the best home printer that I have had as of now, and would recommend it to anyone.

What I was looking for.
I was looking for a printer to print documents, photo's and websites. The most important feature was duplex printing (printing both sides without reinserting the paper.)I looked at hp, but all the printers that i liked had duplex as an extra option. The epson printer didn't even offer this. I looked at canon and noticed that they have this feature standard. I also read review saying that these are one the fastest printers around. My only hesitation was that it looked ugly on the pictures on the sites, because eventhough it's a printer it should look good. But I decided to buy it anyway....and I'm really surprised, this i by far the best printer.

Printer & Feauters
Getting it out of the box, the first thing I notice is that the printer looks nicer than I thought it looked like on the Canon site. On the site, on the pictures it looked like it had a light grey with black color. In reality it's more a a dark grey with black parts, should look nice in a room with black or silver pc components. It's really fast and very quiet. When I printed a test photo on a 4x6 I thought the printer wasn't working. I turned away for a few seconds and saw the photo. Completely quiet for photo's and for documents it makes a bit more sound, but still the quietest printer I have heard. The duplex feature works flawless. You can choose to print only one or both sides. Enabling duplex it prints first on one side, then automatically the paper is pulled back in the printer and the other side is printed. This is by far the best feature of this printer. It was really a hassle to reinsert the paper on my old hp to print on the other isde. The dual paper path is nice, you can keep one type of paper in the cassete and another type in the top loader. I only put a4 paper in the cassete loader. This way the top loader is always closed giving it a nice cubic look. In the cassette the papers are sealed inside protecting them from dust.It also has pictbridge connection to connect directly a camera. The prints are really nice and is 95% close to the quality of a printshop.

Advanced features
This printer also has a lot of customization in the software. You can do 2 types of print head cleaning and 2 types of print head alignment. You can also set it to do "auto power on/off" and it has "quiet mode", but without this mode on it's already quiet. It has some nice effects to add to prints like monochrome, noise remover and image optomizer.

Things you should know
One thing about the speed. The default driver settings lets the printer wait for ink to dry before it continuoes printing when doing duplex or ink-heavy prints....this does slow-down printing...although it's still faster than all other printers out there. This waiting for ink is only used when the printer thinks the ink is wet. Setting the driver to "no waiting for ink to dry" gives you the most performance possible.
I also noticed that ip4200 and ip5200 in the us version don't have printing to cd. While other regions do have this feature built-in. Why would canon remove this feature for only the us version? The printer does not come with a USB 2 cable. I know these are cheap, they should have included it. They do include 5 sheets of 4x6 but no cable?

Conclusion
This is really the best all-round printer.....i don't see the point in buying the more expensive ip5200. This is also the best bargain in printer right now. The prints are really nice. Th best features of this printer are the duplex printing and it's really quiet. It also looks nice. The only thing missing is cd-printing, it actually has this, but was removed for the US version and the missing usb cable. This is really the best midrange printer with some high-end features.

I have been using this printer now for a little over 6 weeks and I really can't find any fault with it for what I use it for, printing fantastic quality photos. It prints super high resolution photos, does double sided printing, has inks that will last over 100 years in optimum conditions and its virtually effortless to install.
I have been using it with my canon digital elf camera, and at first I thought the printer was lacking in quality output (the blues as well as the blacks were slightly off).
It turns out that after a long process of printing and testing different photos that i took with different cameras (I own an Olympus camera also) that the printer was right on target. Some of the photos that were taken were either in poor light or the camera settings were slightly off enough to make the print come out less than perfect.
The best test you can do is to try and print out a good quality digital benchmark photo or picture. One that you know whose colors are well balanced. I found a website that has a lot of great quality artistic high res photos to print out for comparison http://forums.cgsociety.org/.
So if you have poor results printing out your own photos and think that this printer is lacking, print out some of the photos on the CGsociety website and youll be astonished at how spectacular this printer produces breathtaking prints at an affordable price (It virtually sips ink... My cartridges are still going even after well over 100 4x6 and 5 full 8 1/2 x 11 prints!).

This is a great printer for the money. I was a little hesitant to buy it since it has not been reviewed anywhere yet but was happy when I recieved it. I believe it is the replacement for the ip4000 and the ip3000.

The print quality was very good, and this is a very fast inkjet printer. Installation was very easy and installing the printer head and ink cartridges was very simple. Part of the reason I choose this printer is because there are 5 ink cartridges...unlike HP or my old epson that I replaced. When one color runs out of the "color" cartridge the whole thing must be replaced. With this (and other) Canon's that is not the case.

Is it worth $20 bucks more than the ip4000? Was for me. It prints faster (PPM) and has double the DPI due to the 1 picoliter drops (instead of 2 I believe on the 4000). And get free shipping from buy dot com and it pretty much makes up for the extra $20 bucks. Overall I highly recommend this printer to anyone looking in this price range.

Note that it does not come with a USB cable, or at least mine did not.

Disregard comments from reviewers who say you can't buy ink refill kits or individual ink cartridges for this printer - you can.

So far, this is the best printer I have ever owned. And I have owned several HPs and two Canon S750s. It prints text, graphics, and photos, and it prints them well. There are many good reasons why Consumer Reports ranked this the no. 1 inkjet printer.

Try it. You'll like it.

I have a canon S900 printer (it was the high end printer when I bought it). I had to write this review to clarify information regarding the ink cartridges. The reviewer who say that "ink is a total rip off" definitely has NOT done his research... least not very well. You CAN buy the cartridges individually (as is true of my Canon S900). The color ones for this unit are CLI-8C, CLI-8M, and CLI-8Y along with a black cartridge of CLI-8Bk. It has another black cartridge PGI-5 (a pigment black). two black ink cartridges one for photos and one for non-photo. If you do a search on Amazon using the words "canon" and "CLI-8" you will find the individual cartridges. they also sell a two pack of the pigment black unit (as well aa a single unit one also). Probably the two pack would be cheaper and useful if this printer is your primary printer for text. Now local stores: I checked Best Buy online and they sell this and I'm fairly sure they sell it at their local stores since this series of cartridges are use by more than just this particular printer. (They sell the canon cartridges for my printer online and at the stores, individually.) CompUSA also sells them too... again individually. So I don't know where the person "who can only buy a complete set of cartridges" lives... in the middle of nowhere?... but he knows that Amazon exists since he entered in a review on its site so you might ask yourself why didn't he check Amazon and their partners out because its all there on Amazon's site. I love my S900. Now it has the Photo Magenta and Photo Cyan colors in addition to the standard Magenta and Cyan (the more expensive photo printer all do in order to be able to produce even more shades of each color so the photos are even more accurate but I've seen photos from my friends Canon printer (4 colors compared to my 6 color) and they are still excellent. You can also SEE the ink inside the cartridges (least on mine you can because the housing is transparent). I like that, compared to the ones from other manufacturers (especially the tri-color cartridges) where if you run out of one color you can't even see how much of the other two colors were left. (ink that goes to waste.. which is probably why they aren't transparent.) Actually I believe its transparent in order for the printer to figure out exactly how much ink is left. In the past many printers didn't really know how much ink was really left, so when you check the printer status on your computer, when it shows how much ink you had left it, that was really an estimate based upon the print driver tracking how much printing you had done (since you replaced the cartridges). Canon actually uses light to detect the level of the ink through the transparent housing for an more accurate status of the ink levels.
Recommendation: I always keep one spare cartridge of each color so that I don't run out at the wrong time (i.e. in the middle of the night after all the stores are closed). Once I load in my spare I then can either a) buy a replacement spare from a local electronics or office supply store or b) order online from Amazon or some other Internet store. Hope this helps.

I first bought the Canon iP5000 and then realized that there are quite a number of reports of photos from the iP5000 fading within a few months when exposed to light. I wouldn't want to send prints to family and have them tell me a year later that they had to dump my prints because they are all faded away.

Canon is introducing the ChromaLife100 ink with the Canon iP4200 printer that is supposed to last 30 years in moderate light. I can't attest to that, but I can say that my iP5000 photos have noticably faded in just a little over a month (they still look good, though).

The specs betweent he iP5000 and iP4200 are identical as far as I can tell and the iP4200 is quite a bit cheaper. Moreover, I can't tell a difference between the printouts from both of these printers. They both look great and perform well.

I'm very happy with the iP4200. I don't seem to get quite the same quality prints as I do with a 35mm negative developed at the photo lab, but it comes pretty close. Skin tones seem slightly off and slightly pixelated, but I have to look up close to notice. The iP5000 had this same issue. Perhaps I'm not tweaking the image right in my photo editor. It's good enough, though, that I'd send these off to my family now and I hope Canon's 30-year claim holds true.

Update: 2/17/11 - well, the best printer I've ever had finally died. Actually, the Waste Ink Absorber filled and it was more expensive to repair than to buy a new one. The problem, I think, is that I turned the printer off when I left the house (i.e. several times per day) and each time I turned it back on it went through the check routine which seems to add to the waste ink. Next printer I'll only turn it off at night. BTW, Canon has a Customer Loyalty program (866-443-8002)and I was able to get a newer model at 25% off with free 2-day shipping.

Original: I've had Epson printers since the old dot matrixes and I thought there were none better. But in the last few years the quality has gone down with each successive one I've bought. So when my C82 died I decided to try Canon. I'll never go back! I haven't tried everything with this iP4200 yet, but my newsletter with text and images came out beautifully, much better than on the Epson, with NO smudges - the ink was dry when it came out of the printer. Crisp and clear, with great color.

And at this price, you can't beat it.

Later (June 14) - I still love this printer and I've printed several thousand items on it by now, including cardstock and envelopes. At first I used up a LOT of ink, then I found that by adjusting the printing options it wouldn't use nearly as much.

And the 2-sided printing is awesome.

Update: 2 years later and it's still going strong. I use it every day and by now I've printed many thousands of newsletters, and probably thousands of other things like postcards, envelopes with never a hiccup.

Bought this printer for a combination of photos, color graphics, and text printouts.
STUNNING photo quality prints on photo paper! Also, very good text printing (spreadsheets, etc.). But, my experience so far with business graphics on regular photocopy paper are sort of washed out (like any other inkjet I think).
This is also a very fast printer! Prints 4x6 photos on photo paper in 30 seconds, and full page spreadsheets in a few seconds!
This machine is one of the very few products that I've bought over the past few years that has an EXCELLENT paper manual and online help for detailed printing tips, etc.. Even though it is a "mini-manual", it has been VERY well thought out, and well written and tested for various pitfalls.
Paper handling is superb with 2 trays, everything slides in and out nicely, and overall very well thought out machine.

The printer was received promptly (a tracking number was provided)and was well packaged. Unfortunately the printer wouldn't print. After carefully following the setup instructions and the trouble shooting instructions Canon customer service was called. After repeating the trouble shooting steps with the service technician he came to the conclusion that the print head was faulty and sent out a new print head at no cost. After installing the new print head, the printer still would not print. A second call to the Canon technical service number and repeating all the trouble shooting steps led to the conclusion that the printer was faulty. A brand new printer was sent out with instructrucions for the exchange of the faulty original at no cost to me. The new printer worked as expected and the faulty printer was returned with a prepaid shipping label.

Although the printer is described as a photo printer I use it as a black and white text printer as I have an Epson photo printer dedicated to that task. The first copy that the printer makes is slow to be printed as the printer must go through all the preliminary steps of priming and charging the color nozzles of each ink color (there are 5 ink color cartridges) prior to printing. Because of this step there is ink usage of all the color cartridges even though the text printing of documents uses black ink only. The ink cartridges have chips which estimate the ink useage of each cartridge and if the chip estimates that one color is empty (even though it may not be) the printer will not work until that cartridge is replaced. The branded ink cartridges are expensive relative to the cost of the printer. The printer documentation warns that any damage caused by using non-manufacturer branded ink cartridges will void the warranty (it is illegal under U.S. law to outright prohibit the use of non-manufacturer branded ink cartridges in order to obtain warranty service). The ink cartridge status seems to indicate a greater useage of the color inks than would be expected using only the black ink for printing but I have not yet printed enough to empty any cartridge.