Customer Reviews

Canon Pixma iP4500 Photo Inkjet Printer (2171B002)

5 star:		(104)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

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.

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 [...]

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.

I don't normally write a notes to people about a product but I just have to tell you all about my new Photo Printer.
After months of research and reading reviews and product testing etc. I settled on a new Canon Pixma iP4500.
After printing Two photos I am truly in awe and amazement at the Power of a $100 inkjet printer.
I own a few other Canon products, a Canon CanoScan 8400F, and a Canon MiniDV Camcorder. I have not owned a Canon Pinter however since the early 1990's when I used a Bubblejet printer.

The iP4500 retails for $130 but I got it on sale from Amazon for $99. It came with free shipping and Its amazing I placed the order Feb 2nd and It was delivered on Feb 6th. It has 5 individual Ink Tanks. I had been leaning towards an Epson RX595
all-in-one printer for the last 6 months but I kept being drawn to the new Canon line every time I visited Staples. I really did not need a Printer/Scanner/Copier thinga-majig... I just needed a decent photo printer. There is the standard C, M, Y. and then a black, and another Black which is Pigment Black. I learned later the other black is Dye Black. All I know is that the two Blacks are used for different things, the Dye Black is for great Photos and the Pigment Black is for great sharp quality text. I had leaned towards the Epsons because of the 6 ink tanks: with the CMYK and then Photo Cyan and Photo Magenta. But I have to tell you that this printer does a darn good job with the colors it has. One very cool feature I did not know about is the iP4500 has two paper paths. There is a Rear tray that can hold up to 50 sheets of paper and a Cassette tray that can hold 150 sheets of paper. I decided I would use the Rear tray for photo paper and the Cassette for Plain paper. I can switch with the push of a button on the printer itself or with the software.

I have been using a HP Deskjet 960C forever. It was used primarily for business graphics but I often tried to print photos with it but never got the best results I had hoped for. It took a lot of tinkering to get a decent Photo print from the HP. I am sure HP's newer printers are great but I am tired of all the 2 cartridge printers, I hated running out of blue and having to replace the whole tri color cart. Even if these Individual Ink tanks may not hold as much ink, at least when Blue runs out, I can just go buy blue.

About the photos... I found two pictures of my new kitties. I had edited these pics for 4x6 size and set print res to 266dpi. I adjusted the curves and played with the saturation to try and make the odd colors level out. I own a Nikon Coolpix digital camera which I've used for 6 years, although its showing its age, it still takes decent photos. I did some basic sharpening and got rid of the red eye. I use Adobe Photoshop CS (v8) and set the image to print. Using the Canon IJ Print Utility I set the pic to high quality photo glossy paper. I have some 4x6 photo glossy paper I got last Christmas, not Canon brand, but it works. I put the paper in the rear tray and set it to print in Photoshop. Here is the most amazing part... A FULL COLOR 4x6 Photo was printed in LESS than 20secs!!!! I could not believe it. My old HP would take 2-3 minutes for a 4x6 Photo especially with Glossy paper. The Image was dry already and did not smudge. The ink drops are so tiny. I had to pull out a Loop and look through it to see the pixels. They are that small... I normally am used to pixelated photos. But this photo at just 266dpi res showed NO VISIBLE pixelation!

Now the main thing I did not like about this iP4500 is the lengthy Print head alignment process. It took me 3 sheets of paper wasted and the Alignment used a bunch of blue and black ink. I do not know why, but it took over 15 minutes for the printer. The 2nd thing I did not like is the CD that comes with the printer allegedly has some good software on it but It won't load on my Mac. The only thing that my Mac saw on the iP4500 CD was the Printer Driver and an Electronic Manual. So if you are wanting a Printer combo software pack, you won't get anything with this printer.

Of course, I have come to expect that USB printer cables do not come with Printers now a days. But I just don't understand why for a few bucks more these companies cannot put a basic cable in there. These Printers should be good to go right out of the box. Luckily my old HP had a USB2.0 cable which I connected to the USB2.0 port on my Mac and then the Mac OSX saw the printer right away. I am using OSX Tiger 10.4.11 on my main Mac a MDD Dual G4. I wish my Mac mini could hook up to the iP4500 as well. But I do 95% of my photos and graphics with the G4.

Sorry for a lengthy review. But I was just amazed and hoped telling someone they might consider a Canon printer.

During printer setup I encountered the printer's 'output tray closed' error message accompanied by three flashes of the printer's amber warning LED. The iP4500 will not align the print head or print while this message is displayed; so I was prevented from completing setup.

Some investigating showed that my printer's plastic housing mechanically interferes with its output tray, preventing the tray from opening fully. The problem is made worse when the printer's paper cassette is in the housing. Removing the cassette allowed me to see the interference and learn to maneuver the interfering plastic so that the output tray can be fully opened and the printer operates as intended.

At this time (printer has been in use for one day) the output tray still binds on opening, but bending the tray slightly while opening provides a workaround. Also, my printer's location allows me to leave the tray open when not in use, making it easy for family members to use the printer without the risk of breaking the tray. If the interference doesn't loosen with time, I will trim the plastic with a knife or small file.

Now that I have a workaround for the output tray problem, I hope the printer will perform as well as its reviews indicate. In contrast, my experience with Canon support is that they were not helpful, even when I explained that the tray was not opening far enough to trigger the tray's sensor. At the time of my support call, I was unable to print without applying continuous hand pressure on the output tray, bending it and running the risk of breaking the plastic. The Canon support rep agreed that the printer probably had a hardware problem. However, the rep also told me that Canon does not do warranty work on the iP4500 and that no new printers are available to exchange for defective iP4500s. Instead Canon support offered to replace my new iP4500 with a refurbished printer, but I declined to make the exchange.

Reading this review may help you avoid similar difficulty during printer setup and may alert you to the fact that, at this time, Canon will not repair or replace a defective iP4500 with a new unit. Instead a refurbished printer will be offered in exchange.

My rating is based on: 1) the iP4500 is not a low-tier product. Canon support should include competent repair or new replacements when repair is not practical 2)customers should not have to work around or re-engineer the printer's mechanics to make the printer operate.

My new Canon iP4500 printer works great -- with the Canon software that accompanies their product. It fails miserably, however, with my Photoshop CS2 software. My third print with the Canon iP4500 displayed a series of parallel lines across the surface. After testing several prints from different photos with the same results, I e-mailed Canon technical help, twice. First, I was instructed to realign the printer head. I'd done that, per their software directions when I set up the printer, and doubted head alignment was the problem. Nonetheless, I followed their instructions and realigned the print head, twice. The problem remained unresolved. I contacted e-mail technical help a second time and was instructed to remove the ink tanks, unlock and remove the print head, then replace the head and the ink, realign the head, and try again. No difference. I then called technical support, expecting a voice from India and little help beyond something simple and ineffective -- that was my previous experience with Hewlett-Packard. Instead, I heard an American voice and was walked through a procedure that ultimately identified my Photoshop CS2 software as my problem. I had no such limitations with Hewlitt-Packard and am still discouraged at this, for me, serious limitation.

The resulting Canon prints are superior to the HP Photosmart D7360. In fact, the Canon black and white prints are VASTLY superior to the HP. The iP4500 also is markedly faster and loads both regular letter-size paper and photo-paper that can be accessed from two separate trays. My HP, for example, required I remove one kind of paper and manually load the other when I needed to switch papers. The iP4500 takes five inks, two black. My D7360 took six inks, one black. Replacing ink in the iP4500 is less expensive.

I love the results from the Canon iP4500. The software Canon provides out-performs what HP sent with their D7360. I strongly recommend the iP4500.

When you read this, please keep in mind all of the other reveiws. I bought my printer this past October. This is a great printer. I'm glad I got it. I'll keep it for a long time because it does what I need. I print 4x6 photos in standard mode and they look very good. The printer used little ink compared to the old Canon i850 I had. I can print documents on both sides and save paper.

I've printed prints and documents with no problems unitl this week. I had a problem with the yellow ink cartridge. I got an error message and the "15 flashes" error code. That means the printer could not read the cartridge's chip and if it can't read the chip, the printer will not print anything.

I reseated the catridge several times with no luck. I installed a new cartridge and it worked fine. The old cartridge is still 3/4 full of ink.

I'm mad. I send an email to Canon support explaining what's happening to my printer. Within hours, Canon sends me an email apologizing for the problem and tells me a new yellow cartridge is on the way; UPS 2-day Air. And if this doesn't fix the problem, the printer is covered under an "Instant Exchange" warranty. I can't be mad anymore. Problem solved. It still calls for 5 stars.

After much deliberating between brands and features, I decided to go with a medium priced printer for my general purpose printing and some photo printing.

When the printer arrived I was a little surprised too at how big the box was but the printer still fits nicely on a standard stand.

Setup is a snap. Install the Printer Head, he Cartridges, install the driver and plug it in. That's it. I am happy to see that Canon provides 64bit drivers for most of their printers now so it was not problem on my Vista 64 bit machine.

The driver naturally automatically installs selections for most Canon papers and printing a Borderless 4x6 using the Canon 4x6 Glossy Plus Paper resulted in pretty good colors in comparison to my calibrated monitor. I do not recommend to have the driver manage colors, let the Software do it (like Photoshop) it's just doing a better job at it.

Overall, I think it's a great value and a good and fairly fast printer.
The added bonus of having 2 trays (I use the cassette for plain paper) saves me time in switching paper around.

I received the Printer very fast from the Vendor (3days) at a Great Price. This is my second Photo Printer and I have to say the Best I have ever used. Set up was super easy, within 45 minutes I was up and Ready to Print, I grabed 2 pictures and Printed them as 5x7 Prints. They printed in 40 seconds WOW Very sharp and Clear with no running or smearing of colors, I am amazed at the speed and the quality of the Prints for a little over 100.00 This was a Great investment for a Color Injet Printer. Look no Further and Buy this one You will not be disappointed!!!

This printer is amazing. It is fast, produces accurate color and is easy to use. I like that it turns off automatically when not in use. It has many features, such as automatic calibration, that I expected to find only in much more expensive printers.