Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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166 of 168 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding printer, great value, November 1, 2007
I had a Canon BubbleJet BJC-4200 long ago, and after that printer I was very hesitant to even consider another Canon printer. When my most recent printer died, an HP DeskJet 970cse, I needed to find a good printer that could print duplex and produce quality output. After reading many, many reviews I decided to give Canon another chance. I am very glad that I did so.
The Pixma iP4500 arrived in a huge box, and as it turns out it needed the space. This is a larger printer than I expected, and as a result I had to rearrange my desk to find room for it. That's a small oversight on my part. The printer itself is an unassuming-looking box of a machine, though it resembles more of a printer when the paper trays are populated.
Setup was easy and straightforward, though I do recommend using the "getting started" insert before setting everything up. Though setting everything up is relatively self-explanatory, it is helpful to see the illustration of what to do in order before making the leap. Overall, setup took maybe 20-30 minutes once the parts were all out of the box and everything was set up.
Once configured, installing the drivers is simple. Drop in the CD, follow the prompts, and turn on the printer at the right time. No fuss.
Once set up and powered on, the printer is ready to go to work. I print a majority of my things in duplex mode so I tweaked the driver configuration to make it the default, after which the setting is more or less invisible. Everything in the driver configuration is very easy to find, straightforward, and simple.
There are two ways to feed paper into the iP4500. There is a top-loader which is the default paper source and there is a front-loading paper tray ("cassette" according to Canon's documentation). Heavier papers such as card stock should be loaded from the top-loader.
So, how does this printer perform? I'll break it down into two parts, speed and quality.
Speed - this is a relatively fast printer! Feeding it a print job that conists of a two-sided black and white print this printer can churn out the pages, including the dry time for the front page, in about 20 seconds. Granted, this is my experience and your mileage may vary but it's a good starting point from which to base your evaluation of the speed. My previous printer would take at least a minute to print the very same documents, and it still couldn't keep up when in draft mode. For photo printing it churns out a full-page 8.5"x11" borderless photo in roughly 45 seconds.
Quality - what good is speed without quality? This printer backs it up. The text and basic image quality is acceptable, though it could be a touch better. This is not noticeable in day-to-day print jobs. On photo printing, though, this printer is an absolute showstopper. The photos it prints, on photo paper, are better than most magazine prints and could easily be used for photo studio gallery shots.
It would be nice if the printer actually had a USB cable in the box, but this is a small thing.
Overall, this is a high-quiality, high-performance printer that is sure to please even the staunchest of critics. It is fast, creates beautiful output, and is very easy to set up.
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84 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Claus Wolf's MyMac.com Review, February 15, 2008
Canon labels the Pixma iP4500 as a premium photo and document printer, and when I bought it in early January my main purchasing criteria was high quality photo prints and the ability to print on DVDs and CDs.
The printer itself looks tremendously stylish. Next to my iMac it looks as if the designers of the printer had been sitting in front of an iMac when coming up with the design. The printer looks great, which kind of is important as it is located together with my iMac in the living room. The only downside to the good looks is that the shiny black plastic attracts dust like a magnet.
One of the many up-sites to this printer is that it has two paper trays. The bottom tray sticks out about 10 cm (4 inch), when you expand it to hold A4 paper, but that is a small price to pay, considering that this way you do not have to store paper in the top tray. The top tray easily adjusts to hold all sorts of paper sizes from 4x6 photo paper to A4 or letter size. A button on the main unit lets you select the tray you wish to use and I found this a real benefit.
I like the printer driver, though I haven't a lot to compare it to. I find it easy to use and flexible enough to fulfill my beginner's needs.
Photo Quality
Comparing photo quality is really hard, as I do not have a bunch of similar printers here, for which I could compare print outs side by side. So I will just simply say that the print outs I have made on glossy photo paper look stunning. So stunning indeed that we have a few of them hanging in our living room already.
The printer uses 5 separate ink tanks, which I am being told is good for photo quality, and i am happy to believe that. What it really means to me is that if one color is out, I can just replace that one color rather than an entire combined cartridge. In my opinion the environmental and bank account friendly option.
Placing a photo print out next to pictures I had "developed" by a popular German photo printing service I must say I personally would consider the Pixma iP4500 print outs almost a bit nicer, at least the smaller sizes, though it greatly depends on the photo paper you use.
The first photo paper I tried obviously wasn't of the best quality, I have to admit, and thus you end up seeing some tracks from where the printer transported the paper. That is rather unfortunate as it takes away from the otherwise superb impression the pure print-quality gives me.
Of course I tried better quality photo paper as well, and those tracks weren't there. So you will definitely want to invest in good photo paper to get the best prints, but I would assume you knew that already. I also find that investing in photo paper with a higher weight per square meter makes the prints feel more like "real photos", but again I would think that you all knew that already.
When printing a normal photo at A4 (about letter size) I notice a minute amount of striping in one area, but I need to get within a few inches of the A4 print in order to see the striping and it is only noticeable in an area of grey clouds. Looking at the image from a normal distance, I cannot see much of a difference. I printed that image last night and the first thing I am going to do is buy an A4 frame, that photo is going to hang in my office.
Black & White
We used the printer to print the inlays and envelopes for our wedding invitations, while black and white only, the speed with which these print outs were completed was purely amazing and the quality was perfect for my impression. Our friends and family were impressed to have professionally printed, yet personalized invitation cards.
In my opinion the result was extremely good and I would be hard pressed to find any fault with the output. Comparing it to my three year old laser printer, I would say that the quality was better and the print outs happened much quicker.
Speed
From a pure specification point of view the printer can deliver a 10x15 borderless photo in 9600x2400 dpi in about 21 seconds. Documents can be printed with a speed of up to 31 pages per minute (b/w) and 24 pages per minute (color).
Printer speeds are hard to really achieve, as they are measured under very specific conditions that we endusers normally don't see. I would think they are more a guide value than anything else and my impression of this printer is that it is quick, very quick.
Did I sit next to my printer and have it print a 30 page document to measure its speed? No I didn't. Did I stop the speed of printing a 4x6 borderless photo? Yes, I did, it took about 35 seconds, which is considerably slower, but when do you start to measure? When you push the print button, or when the printer makes its first noise of transporting the paper? I did measure from pressing the print button to finished photo and I don't think that speed is anything to complain about.
PictBridge
A nice feature is the ability to print directly from my digital camera. I have a Canon A700 which is PictBridge compatible and I plugged it into the printer just to see whether that would work. I was pleased to say the least - the print outs just worked and while I don't think I would trust my Mom to print a high quality photo from within iPhoto, I think that she'd have no issue getting it done this way.
This isn't going to be a feature, I am going to use every day, not even every week or month, but I definitely can see its usefulness.
Printing on CDs & DVDs
One of my requirements for buying this printer was that it should print on CDs and it does. You get a little plastic tray, in which you place the CD/DVD and you fire up the CD Label Print Application to design the label you would like to print.
While the print outs are of decent to good quality, I have a bunch of gripes about this particular feature.
The biggest complaint I have is the software not allowing you to adjust the inner circle to be smaller. The DVDs I bought have a fairly large printable area (see photo), but the software cannot adjust to this larger printable area and thus leaves you with a large white inner circle. I already adjusted the circle as much as was possible to reduce the remaining white area, but it is still rather disappointing to get your DVDs, see that they really look good, but still have that white circle in the middle. There is also a bit of white space at the outer edge, which is less than a millimeter and doesn't bother me too much.
What you see here is that it tells you that the inner circle cannot be smaller than 17mm, but I can only get it to be 33mm. So text and reality just do not match up resulting in the following print out:
The software unfortunately is also not quite intuitive, no tool tips for icons for a starter. My first attempts at printing a DVD saw me resize an image to cover the entire disk, but when I printed this image to disc, the software seemed to have magically reduced the image and printed it much smaller than what it was showing me and thus left a very ugly white space on the disc. So while the software is pretending to be WYSIWYG, it really is more like what you see is what you might get (WYSIWYMG).
If you set a background image that problem isn't there and t works quite well, you get additional design elements like text, rectangle, circles and the lot - but all in all the CD Label Print software leaves me wholly unimpressed as "old fashioned" looking, difficult to use, not quite ready for more complex label designs and most importantly not quite flexible enough, where it does count.
All in all
I think it is tremendously difficult to evaluate a product you have purchased yourself. After all, if you bought it you want to make yourself believe that you made the right decision, objectivity can be hard to come by. I have tried hard to be as objective as possible, but I might be a bit harsh in my verdict.
All in all I am very happy with the printer. The print outs that I have shown to friends and family have impressed, I personally like both the photo and standard print quality. I am sure there is better, but I know there is worse.
There is that issue with the CD Label Software not being flexible enough and this I find annoying as it was one of the main reasons for purchasing this printer.
On the whole I am really happy with the printer and would recommend it to others. Is there room for improvement, yes there is a little, and I hope that Canon will address it as much as is possible with software updates. From a reviewer rating point of view - this is a very decent product, but also look at the competition.
If you were to buy this printer, I am sure you wouldn't regret it - thus I am happy to award:
MyMac.com Rating: 4 out of 5 [...]
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39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent printer, December 3, 2007
A previous reviewer has covered most of my impressions about this printer, so I will only highlight the main ones. Overall, this is an excellent printer. It is a little large, when all the trays are fully extended (h=13.5", depth = 21', width 17.5"), which could be a problem for users with limited space. However, one does not need to use both trays (at least not at all times), so it is possible to reconfigure it so that it can fit better into limited space. Having two trays is handy, since it makes it easier to switch between paper of difference sizes or qualities.
Setting up the printer is fairly straightforward, though somewhat time-consuming, in part because it spends about 12 minutes calibrating itself as part of the setup. The instructions are ok, but the accompanying informational book is only fair. Some aspects of the printer use are not addressed, so one has to make educated guesses to have the printer do certain things. Once operational, the printer is fast, capable of two-sided output, and produces high quality printing. Text on plain paper is very good, though on close inspection one can see a little bleeding of the ink. It's about as good as any nonlaser text I've seen, be it HP, Canon, or Epson. Photographs are spectacular, with brilliant colors, and very high resolution. Overall, this is an excellent choice if you are looking for a good general purpose printer, capable of producing fine text and photographs at high speed.
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