New printers are far more capable: Canon iP4300

Our several year old ink jet printer died the other day. It was an Epson Stylus Pro 5000. I knew it was on its way out, so I had been researching printers a little recently. I knew that printer quality and features had been growing substantially in recent years.

I found a review by M. David Stone of the Canon iP4300 InkJet printer and was intrigued, but a little skeptical. Upon seeing it at the local office supply store, I wasn’t impressed. How good can a $100 printer be?

I told my wife I was considering it, and upon learning the price she immediately said not to get it: she wanted a really good quality printer.

Here are some features I really like

• 2 paper trays. I can keep photo paper in the cassette, and plain paper in the auto sheet feed. When I choose a paper type, the paper source is chosen automatically.
• Automatic switching of paper trays based on paper type
• Automatic power on when a print job is requested.
• Automatic power off after n minutes of inactivity
• Quiet operation (our old printer was as big as a tank and sounded like one too.)
• The photo printing seemed very high quality and very fast.

Sure, the light plastic frame didn’t seem as solid as the Epson, but it functions well. I easily added the Canon as a shared printer to the several home computers on our home network.

One bug I found: the printer driver itself has a print preview feature (in addition to any preview that client application software might have), but it seemed to be disabled from any shared printer. I pushed the “Help” button on that dialog, which only described that the button would allow a preview. How do I figure out what makes the button disabled?

Another bug: the automatic paper tray switching based on paper type seemed only to work on the machine the printer was attached to. On other network machines, I had to choose the paper source manually.

Our old printer had a feature that would mirror an image, for iron on transfer sheets. I couldn’t find such a feature on the Canon, but then realized that choosing “T-Shirt transfers” would do it.

I took some Fox program code and printed it out in color. It looked really good.

I logged onto my home web server from my office at Microsoft, chose a photo, printed it. I got a warning picture indicating that the paper output tray needed to be opened (kids). So when I got home, I opened the tray and the picture printed.

The printer cost less than the accessories that I bought along with the printer: more ink cartridges and a USB cable, but it was still a small fraction of the price of our old printer.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 06, 2007
  The price is in the ink cartridges <s>... You'll probably spend $40 or more everytime you need to replcae the cartridges. This is something you can probably appreciate: Here in Hawaii I have major issues with ink. On most printers I can't begin to use cheaper replacement ink as the ink doesn't work. Even with the 'full cost' ink I often get banding and color inconsistencies with various printers. On top of it the ink seems to clog when let sit for more than a week or so. The latter seems odd but I've never had these issues on the mainland with more moderate climate <s>. I've been a big fan of color lasers for business needs. They're cheap (although not as cheap as ink jets <s>), have a pretty long cartridge life, are fast and usually do much better with text. OTOH, you wouldn't print family photos with them (although images print surprisingly good if you have the right paper that works with lasers).

• Anonymous
  July 15, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 06, 2007
  The comment has been removed