Canon PIXMA iP4000 Photo Printer

Works very well. This is my fourth inkjet color printer, I wore out the previous three. Color is good, black and white is OK but I still prefer my Laser (HP 5Si). Ink use is good, service is easy and the duplex works great albeit slow. I have used Canon, new clone, refilled by others and refilled by me cartridges and all worked fine. The carrier needs to be cleaned periodically and the documentation that comes with the printer is poor but there are full service manuals on the Internet for free. This is probably my last inkjet since solid ink printers are in the same price class and produce better results. However, I would buy another so long as the cartridges are not "chipped" to prevent use of alternate brands.

I went from a very annoying 5 yo HP ink jet printer to the Pimxa 4000. It is a startling transition; printers have evolved far faster than computers in the past five years.Other reviewers will comment on images, etc. Suffice to say they are extraordinary, you must use Canon papers and inks, etc etc. Here are some points that you may not read elsewhere.1. It's a 50 MB driver installation for XP, about 30MB for OS X! Both drivers are complex. I also installed the borderless printing package on my G3 iBook, but it's too slow to be useable. It's also as ugly as Canon's other OS X software. It's an OS 9 app that's been tweaked to run "native" in OS X; I wonder if it uses some proprietary emulation layer. I suspect the OS 9 version of the same package might be faster.The XP custom install doesn't really let you choose where to put things. The html documentation, for example, ends up in the WINDOWS directory. Weird.2. They say this is a "5 color" printer, but two of them are black. Marketing!3. I almost returned this when the other PIXMAS (5000, etc) came to the US market. On review though, this holds up well. The higher numbered PIXMAs below $200 US mostly have unnecessary gizmos. One of them IS a better photo printer (6 inks), but it seems to be ONLY a photo printer. I need something the kids can print color documents on. There's a $300 PIXMA that is clearly superior (7 colors, 2 black) but it's more than I wanted to spend.4. Most ink jet printers should be used at least weekly, if not every 3-4 days, to keep the nozzles in fine shape. I don't know if that will be true of the PIXMA.5. This is NOT a simple device. It's not trivial to setup or to use. I would not recommend it for someone who's not a photo geek or fond of studying manuals.6. There's no way Canon is making any money on this printer. Clearly their margin is on the supplies.7. Color management is a very dark and extremely misunderstood area. This printer did a plausible job rendering images taken by a Canon camera, processed on a Mac and printed from an XP machine (sRGB profiles on Mac). On the other hand my iBook prints were too yellow. I switched to using ColorSync to control the printing from my iBook. That dramatically slowed printing but produced more plausible colors. I'm still working with this, but I'm currently getting better color results printing from my XP machine than my iBook -- even though all my photos are managed on my iBook.9. It has a parallel port as well as the USB cable. That seems a bit odd. I can't imagine a machine with power enough to use this printer that wouldn't have a USB cable.10. I had trouble doing borderless printing. Eventually I figured out the various complexities of print orientation, image size, etc. I can do borderless printing from Adobe Photoshop Elements and from iPhoto and Graphic Converter. It is quite tricky to set up all the various driver configurations however.

Ok so one nozzle dying is not so bad right? Well once I replaced it then the magenta one died. I was using Canon ink and not cheap replacement ones. I used very good quality paper and photo paper. I am not sure what the cause was but it just kept clogging the nozzles. When it was working right it spent an inordinate amount of time in the purge cycle, basically dumping ink into the pad next to the heads. Frustrated me to no end, mainly because when the nozzle issue happened the first time I burned through 2 other cartridges trying to figure out what happened.Overall the quality was ok, I liked the pictures I made with it until it died. I would buy another Canon product again. I just think I got a lemon with this one. When I bought it it was nearly hundred more dollars. At this price it is now its not a bad deal. My recommendation is to go for it, just be wary of the inks.Thanks for reading my review.

My HP 4 Laserjet had died about a month ago, and I was debating just fixing it (for $200) or buying a new one. After reading a number of reviews, I bought the Canon IP4000, and I don't regret it at all. It's fast, quiet, and has given me excellent print quality for both text and photos.For single-side printing, it's faster than the HP 4, and the quality is good, using "general purpose" print paper of 20# wt. and brightness of 90. Under magnification, there is some fuzziness due to the fact that liquid ink "bleeds" into the cheaper, porous paper, but it is definitely acceptable for most general printing needs. Switching to better paper -- Burlington's "Bright White" in this case, with 100 brightness level and 24# wt. -- the text and line quality is almost indistinguishable from laser print. Very impressive!Duplex printing is a bit slower, but it handles the paper well without so much as a single wrinkle in the page when it's done. Also, printing photos embedded in a document slows it down considerably, but it was never enough to be a problem for me.Printing photographs on 4 X 6" Canon's "Photo Paper Plus Gloss" turn out as good as reprints from a lab. Mine took about 45sec. to print after hitting the print button on my PC. I don't have a digital camera, but it does allow one to be hooked up directly to it.In general, it's a very quiet printer, and has the convenience of two paper trays: One on top and a casette underneath. One word of note: If you're using the Casette to print photo paper, put the paper in face-down! I didn't do this the first time, and was rewarded with ink running all over it and onto my hand. Would have helped to read all the directions I suppose.The only other point first-time users need to remember is that this printer takes about a 15 second delay before beginning a print job. So don't keep hitting the print button or you'll get a lot of copies! Once it kicks in, though, it's off and running. The only noise is that it's a little abrupt when it grabs that first sheet, but otherwise you barely hear it.Setup is also easy; I used the parallel-port cable that had been hooked up to my HP 4. The software loaded without a glitch, and printing from the supplied "Easy-PhotoPrint" program was easy. I'm running Win2K, so it should work as well for XP users.I highly recommend this printer to anyone in the market for a multi-purpose printer. As stated, the text quality is excellent with good paper, and photographs are flawless, in my opinion. It's inexpensive, and from other reviews, is very frugal with ink. Plus, with ink cartridges at $10 - $12, it's much less expensive to keep filled than other brands, and if you have to buy them all at once, it's still cheaper than a single toner cartridge was for my HP 4. I would caution what others have written, and stick with Canon's ink, to avoid any problems with the print head. Also, avoid using the really cheap paper (the kind with a lot of paper particles and dust in it) as with ANY printer, as it will gum it up over time.If you're in the market for a printer, this is the one to get!