Customer Reviews

Canon PIXMA iX7000 Inkjet Business Printer (3302B002)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I purchased this printer primarily for producing sheet music scores in which the wide format is necessary in order to create booklets that are stapled in the center. Each piece of music has a detailed graphic art cover, so image quality was important to me as well, although second to document quality. In searching for the best wide format printer for my needs, I purchased an Epson Stylus 1400, an Epson Workforce 1100, and the Canon ix7000. First, I actually purchased the Epson 1400. I was unsatisfied with its production of sheet music as there was what I found to be excessive feathering on the staff lines, the note heads, and the text in the document. I spoke to an Epson representative who recommended that I try the 1100. The 1100 was better for my purposes and still was able to print very nice images. Its use of two black ink cartridges was also more convenient. However, I was not completely satisfied with it as there was still some feathering on some of the staff lines. However, I really liked the printer and kept it while ordering the Canon ix 7000. I compared the two by printing one of the covers for my music on high quality from both printers and a copy of a piece of sheet music at high and normal quality from each printer. I then wrote what each one was on the back, shuffled the papers and my girlfriend and I selected the best prints from each category through a blind test.

First up was the covers. The covers were black and white with a lot of shadowing, allowing for many shades of black. Both produced quite nice prints with the actual shade being slightly different on each. The Epson printed slightly darker and yellowed while the Canon was more bright and clear. I did not really have a preference except for the fact that the Canon produced an area of solid black with more depth and solidity than the Epson. My girlfriend selected the Canon print as better.

For the actual music document, we both selected the Canon high quality print as best, the Canon normal quality print as second best and the Epson high and normal as 3rd and 4th. This was surprising to me as I felt the Epson did quite a good job as well. However, the Canon showed only the slightest feathering in the staff lines.

For a versatile printer for images and text, I highly recommend this printer. Unless you can afford to have one wide format laser printer for text and an inkjet for images, this printer is the best solution for both that I have found. I should also mention that the build quality of the Canon was the sturdiest and best looking (although biggest) of the bunch.

I purchased this printer for printing my company's brochure. The quality of the printing is outstanding, better than the HP color laser printer that it replaced. It is noisy but not as noisy as the HP color laser. You can use photo paper only from the rear tray but this has not caused problems for me. Maximum paper weight for the cassette is 28 lb. Maximum paper weight for the rear tray is 53 lbs. This weight limit does not allow for heavy photo paper. I have used heavier paper and it does print. However there is a slight imperfection in the print on heavy paper, not a problem for a brochure cover but not acceptable for a picture. The duplexing is only available with plain paper not photo paper. For the brochure I used photo paper but told the printer that it was plain paper, looked great.

A couple of years ago I stepped into the world of large format printers using a HP Design Jet at work. I had to had to learn a lot about different papers, paper sizes, paper weights, paper finishes, paper suppliers, issues with inks, issues with the printer, and printer driver and application interactions. Using any large format printer (which is any size bigger than legal) requires a substantial invest of time and study to produce any results.

When everything comes together, the results are simply stunning! Size does matter!

I wanted a large format printer for home! But which one?

I chose the Canon PIXMA iX7000 Canon PIXMA iX7000 Inkjet Business Printer (3302B002). Why? I read the reviews, which were not too flattering. But I also knew from person experience the difficulties in using large format printers.

I love my ix7000. Yes, there was a learning curve, as with any large format printer.

It meets and exceeds my expectations. It was the right choice for me.

Printing from the cassette (up to 11x14 or A3) the pages are coated by the clear ink so as to equal or better color laser printers. I have gotten over 350 pages of text without using up the black ink!

This is not a photo printer, but it does very well on photos, provided you use photo paper. A 13x19 glossy photo is simply impressive!

All my computers can use the printer via my LAN (which includes Wi-Fi wireless access point).

If you have not used a large format printer before, it will take time to learn and effort to experiment with driver and application interactions. So take your time and be patient with the machine and yourself.

As with any large format printer, paper and inks are always a "special order." You must always order both long before you go out. I have spent almost as much money in paper as I did in buying the printer! I have 11 x 14 paper and photo paper. 13 x 19 paper (34 lb) , matte photo (80 lb), and glossy photo (80 lb). Some papers are $4 a sheet!

There is a bug with all Canon printers while using a network (wired or wireless) connection with Apple Macintosh: To attach a network Canon printer, you MUST be done from the Administrators account. Otherwise the printer never connects.

Though it may not be clear by anything but the most careful reading of the specs, this printer will NOT print 13x19 on anything but photo paper, even from the rear feed. It will not print on 13x19 plain paper. Even if you try to fool it using "Art Paper" settings, it still makes a 35mm border around the printed image - making the effective area less than 11x17. If you're looking for A3+ CAD prints, plain paper posters, or Art prints, this printer will not handle them.

I bought this printer for my small business for it's duplexing and wideformat capabilities. However, 1 year and 2 months into it's life it started printing scratches on all the paper (one of the rollers or paper handlers was scratching it)--deep grooves/scratches into the paper to the point where it was almost tearing the page.

Then just last week, it completely died. I hoping to see if Canon will fix it even though it's a few months out of warranty. I find it funny that it died so close to it's warranty expiration date. I would expect a printer to last at least 2 years as my canon i9100 from almost 7 years ago is still running strong.

Apart from it dying this week, the plain paper print quality was pretty good. It had issues in my opinion with paper selection though. It wouldn't let you run plain paper through the manual feed unless you tricked it and selected one of the photo paper options. The duplexing was also useful.

Another negative for this printer was that it is really loud. I can hear it in the next room even with both doors closed. Also, every time you replace an ink cartridge, it shakes itself to mix the ink and pretty much will shake your whole desk since its mass is so great.

I don't understand why there are so many less than ideal reviews for this printer. Unless it's because the owners didn't use it long enough to get rid of the habits they developed from their old printers. This printer far surpassed my expectations of it, after having been a career long user of HP large format printers.

Yes, it will print up to A3 paper from the cassette, but it only does the largest format prints (over 11 by 17) from the rear paper feed (actually it's on top, like a Lexmark, not the rear like the HP's rear feed was), but it does NOT have to be photo settings or on photo paper. If you use the rear feed, it assumes you are printing photos and sets itself to those conditions, but simply click on the Preferences tab, select what you want and use plain paper...you can select any format you want, and I regularly print 23+ inch (yes...no typo...23 inch...see below), black and white CAD plans on plain paper without any problems or special setups. It will retain these settings until you leave that program, so you only have to set them once for any number of prints of different drawings at that same size.

The photo printing is also far superior to the HP...and the HP was a photo printer as well. I include photos of details and completed models for my builders, so the photos are very important for the construction.

When I have to, I print checks and envelopes on it as well...no problem with single prints of either.

As far as the noise that others are reporting, I don't hear it. It is quieter than any previous printer that I have ever used.

Now, for those of you interested, a little history of how I came to use this. I got this to replace an HP k8600 that I had been using in my business of designing and printing model aircraft plans([...]). I needed both the large format (more on that in a moment...it's actually LARGER than advertised!) and the duplex printing for the instruction booklets I include with my plans.

First, let me back up 15 years...My first printer that was capable of doing this was an HP 1220...I still have it and it still works beautifully...BUT...Windows 7 doesn't support the large format or booklet feature of it, and HP won't upgrade it's driver for Windows 7. So I bought an HP K8600 but quickly found that it would not print large format prints without a border that changed the scale of the drawing (my drawings are all full scale...the builders use them to directly size their parts). And even selecting borderless, it would still add a border that ruined the scale. In booklet format, it would only print 5 by 7 inch pages, regardless of the size of the original page, the paper or the settings (the older 1220 printed four 8 x 10 pages on both sides of 11 x 17 paper, 20 pages in total, and I was looking for it to do that). Then after just two years of struggling with this (and keeping an old XP computer fired up so I could print with the HP 1220), the newer HP k8600 started blowing black ink all over the room! A crack developed INSIDE the molded print head carriage...no fix...so it went in the garbage.

Enter the Canon iX7000. Even though it wasn't advertised, it does do booklet format, and it does them the way the 1220 did...full size, based on the paper size, on both sides of the paper. But the biggest surprise was another unadvertised feature...it will do prints over 23 inches! Since my biggest prints were 24 inches, a little editing of them, and I can now do ALL my printing on one printer up to 13 by 23.5 inches. More than I need. And it feeds the long paper far more accurately than either HP did. Also does my 20 page booklets to the size that I have always done them. It also prints beautiful high resolution photos. I finally was able to retire the old XP computer and the HP 1220 printer.

I love this printer...it is arguably the best one I have ever used in my 30 years of printing with computers. Far superior to the HPs I've used in the recent past, and I can see none of the problems that others are reporting.

I don't know why this printer gets so many bad reviews.

I've had mine for about 18 months now. It works great; I've had no problems at all.

I use it mostly as a regular business printer on 8.5x11" plain paper. It's FAST as an ordinary text printer (slower on photos, but still OK), reasonably quiet, and much more efficient with ink than I expected. Before this I was using Canon MP830 all-in-one printers (which were pretty good too, but they don't sell them anymore). On this one I use only Canon name-brand ink (no off-brands), despite that the ink consumption and price is reasonable (compared to other inkjet printers - the ink is still really expensive in absolute terms).

I print 11x17" plain paper once in a while (mostly photos or schematics) - it works great. I have no problems with ink blobs as reported in other reviews. You do have to tell it's "ink jet" (not plain) paper when printing large format - but then it prints fine on plain paper.

Yes, it's huge and takes a lot of desk space; goes with the large-format territory.

Caveat - I'm running Windows. I'm told if you run Linux you need to by a 3rd party driver (and I don't know how well that works). I do wish Canon would support Linux.

This printer works pretty well for me. I use it for large format schematics on plain paper and large photos for my wife. This printer is just like my old i860 in that it requires that you print a nozzle check every day. Failure to do this will result in premature print head failure. Even doing this, you can expect to replace a print head once a year. I keep new print heads in stock. The ink is quite inexpensive from China. The large 13X19 glossy photo sheets are down to 60 cents a sheet now. The third party ink makes very nice photo prints. This printer is slow to make a photo quality printout. This is no problem for me. I have time. It does duplex printing and this is very handy when printing out a manual for a piece of equipment. The paper feed has always worked well. It is a very large printer. You should have a large desk space available. When they start making color laser printers that make good photos, I will buy one just to keep from doing the constant maintenance. These printers require a chip on each ink cartridge. This ups the price of the cartridges to about 5.50 each. Canon ink prices are astronomical and if you planned to use Canon Ink and money is no object then it will be no problem. Otherwise plan on using third party ink. I bought a second one of these printers just to have the spare parts. Also at 190 dollars for a printer it is not a bad way to get a new print head and set of ink cartridges. You also have other spare parts.

I really expected more for this "Business" printer. First off, the whole setting it up over the network is so arcane and bizarre. I should be able to just plug the printer into a switch and be done with it. But no, First you have to plug it in using USB and install the software in order to be able to print over a network.

Doesn't play well with OSX or linux.

Poorly built. The tabs that hold the paper in the tray keep breaking off.

Trying to find the printer on the Cannon support site is difficult, though a "Business" printer, it's not listed as such on the support site. It's like a schizophrenic printer.

Thankfully, it's still under warranty. Let's hope their customer service is better than this product!

I will admit it -- I did not research carefully enough before purchasing for my heterogeneous office environment. Almost every network printer on the marketplace supports either IPP (CUPS), LPR, or SMB (Windows) protocols, and my printer servers can support any of the above seamlessly.

This printer uses Canon's proprietary BNJP network protocol and not one of the standards. It comes with drivers on a CDROM for Windows and Macintosh systems, but they want you to connect a computer to it with USB for initial configuration even if it will only be used on a network. This is a big, heavy device, and that's not always easy to do.

We run Linux and Macintosh here, and after hours of frustration I have still not been able to get this thing to print even one page from either system. The latest Mac drivers from Canon's web site installed perfectly (their tech support advised using these rather than the older ones on CDROM), but the system's printer setup dialogs do not offer any way to connect to this device over Ethernet. Again -- the manual wants me to move my computer to the printer, or vice-versa, and connect it with USB. Maybe I'll try that later. That shouldn't be necessary for a "network" printer! UPDATE: We eventually sold the printer to a friend with a Mac, after finding that it works fine with a direct USB connection to Mac. That simply wasn't an option on our network setup.

In an office environment, a printer like this should be a shared resource accessible by open standard protocols over the network. HP, Lexmark, Xerox, and others all understand this and support one or more of the standard protocols. Canon apparently missed the memo five or ten years ago that nonstandard protocols are a Very Bad Idea.

The web interface of the printer is accessible easily, once it gets its IP address from DHCP, but that interface allows very little configuration. It would be really nice if Canon had a way in the web UI to tell the printer to switch on a standard protocol, even if that meant giving up some of their more specialized configuration features.

I'm not saying this is a *bad* printer, but it is definitely a *nonstandard* printer for network environments. Research carefully before buying to make sure it will work with your systems, and don't just assume as I did that "everyone" supports the industry standard network protocols.