Home > Consumer Reviews > Canon PIXMA iP4200 Photo Printer

I was a loyal Epson customer for years until my most recent purchase from them let me down.

I researched what my next purchase would be, and was leaning towards the highly rated ip4000. I found that the ip4200 was out, but could not find any reviews whatsoever until I read the first review posted on this site. (As I learned via Epson, newer is not always better). I decided to take the chance, and I bought the ip4200.

It is a fantastic printer. The quality of print for both documents and photographs is beyond belief. I love the design, the ease of installation, and the user-friendly functions. It is also a very quiet printer. The documentation is very thorough. As far as not coming with a USB cable, it was no big deal. I just used the one from the old printer. If this is your first USB 2.0, then I can see that lack of a cable as being annoying.

One small thing I also found impressive is that Canon does not push their own papers on you. There are no statements implying that other papers would somehow harm the printer like some other manufacturers do with their printers. The manual even mentions that using general copy paper is fine. This is a very small thing, but it does stand out. (They do, of course, give a list of all their own papers, but they do need to make a profit too! lol)

Overall, I think that this is the best home printer that I have had as of now, and would recommend it to anyone.

What I was looking for.
I was looking for a printer to print documents, photo's and websites. The most important feature was duplex printing (printing both sides without reinserting the paper.)I looked at hp, but all the printers that i liked had duplex as an extra option. The epson printer didn't even offer this. I looked at canon and noticed that they have this feature standard. I also read review saying that these are one the fastest printers around. My only hesitation was that it looked ugly on the pictures on the sites, because eventhough it's a printer it should look good. But I decided to buy it anyway....and I'm really surprised, this i by far the best printer.

Printer & Feauters
Getting it out of the box, the first thing I notice is that the printer looks nicer than I thought it looked like on the Canon site. On the site, on the pictures it looked like it had a light grey with black color. In reality it's more a a dark grey with black parts, should look nice in a room with black or silver pc components. It's really fast and very quiet. When I printed a test photo on a 4x6 I thought the printer wasn't working. I turned away for a few seconds and saw the photo. Completely quiet for photo's and for documents it makes a bit more sound, but still the quietest printer I have heard. The duplex feature works flawless. You can choose to print only one or both sides. Enabling duplex it prints first on one side, then automatically the paper is pulled back in the printer and the other side is printed. This is by far the best feature of this printer. It was really a hassle to reinsert the paper on my old hp to print on the other isde. The dual paper path is nice, you can keep one type of paper in the cassete and another type in the top loader. I only put a4 paper in the cassete loader. This way the top loader is always closed giving it a nice cubic look. In the cassette the papers are sealed inside protecting them from dust.It also has pictbridge connection to connect directly a camera. The prints are really nice and is 95% close to the quality of a printshop.

Advanced features
This printer also has a lot of customization in the software. You can do 2 types of print head cleaning and 2 types of print head alignment. You can also set it to do "auto power on/off" and it has "quiet mode", but without this mode on it's already quiet. It has some nice effects to add to prints like monochrome, noise remover and image optomizer.

Things you should know
One thing about the speed. The default driver settings lets the printer wait for ink to dry before it continuoes printing when doing duplex or ink-heavy prints....this does slow-down printing...although it's still faster than all other printers out there. This waiting for ink is only used when the printer thinks the ink is wet. Setting the driver to "no waiting for ink to dry" gives you the most performance possible.
I also noticed that ip4200 and ip5200 in the us version don't have printing to cd. While other regions do have this feature built-in. Why would canon remove this feature for only the us version? The printer does not come with a USB 2 cable. I know these are cheap, they should have included it. They do include 5 sheets of 4x6 but no cable?

Conclusion
This is really the best all-round printer.....i don't see the point in buying the more expensive ip5200. This is also the best bargain in printer right now. The prints are really nice. Th best features of this printer are the duplex printing and it's really quiet. It also looks nice. The only thing missing is cd-printing, it actually has this, but was removed for the US version and the missing usb cable. This is really the best midrange printer with some high-end features.

I have been using this printer now for a little over 6 weeks and I really can't find any fault with it for what I use it for, printing fantastic quality photos. It prints super high resolution photos, does double sided printing, has inks that will last over 100 years in optimum conditions and its virtually effortless to install.
I have been using it with my canon digital elf camera, and at first I thought the printer was lacking in quality output (the blues as well as the blacks were slightly off).
It turns out that after a long process of printing and testing different photos that i took with different cameras (I own an Olympus camera also) that the printer was right on target. Some of the photos that were taken were either in poor light or the camera settings were slightly off enough to make the print come out less than perfect.
The best test you can do is to try and print out a good quality digital benchmark photo or picture. One that you know whose colors are well balanced. I found a website that has a lot of great quality artistic high res photos to print out for comparison http://forums.cgsociety.org/.
So if you have poor results printing out your own photos and think that this printer is lacking, print out some of the photos on the CGsociety website and youll be astonished at how spectacular this printer produces breathtaking prints at an affordable price (It virtually sips ink... My cartridges are still going even after well over 100 4x6 and 5 full 8 1/2 x 11 prints!).

This is a great printer for the money. I was a little hesitant to buy it since it has not been reviewed anywhere yet but was happy when I recieved it. I believe it is the replacement for the ip4000 and the ip3000.

The print quality was very good, and this is a very fast inkjet printer. Installation was very easy and installing the printer head and ink cartridges was very simple. Part of the reason I choose this printer is because there are 5 ink cartridges...unlike HP or my old epson that I replaced. When one color runs out of the "color" cartridge the whole thing must be replaced. With this (and other) Canon's that is not the case.

Is it worth $20 bucks more than the ip4000? Was for me. It prints faster (PPM) and has double the DPI due to the 1 picoliter drops (instead of 2 I believe on the 4000). And get free shipping from buy dot com and it pretty much makes up for the extra $20 bucks. Overall I highly recommend this printer to anyone looking in this price range.

Note that it does not come with a USB cable, or at least mine did not.

Disregard comments from reviewers who say you can't buy ink refill kits or individual ink cartridges for this printer - you can.

So far, this is the best printer I have ever owned. And I have owned several HPs and two Canon S750s. It prints text, graphics, and photos, and it prints them well. There are many good reasons why Consumer Reports ranked this the no. 1 inkjet printer.

Try it. You'll like it.