10 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
Thought it was a good deal
Date of Review: Jul 2, 2006
The Bottom Line: It's a good printer, no jams, good quality printing. If you're having ink troubles look to the vents on the top.
About seven months ago I started searching for a new printer. I came on Epinions and found that (at the time) every review just LOVED the iP4200. Separate ink cartridges... double sided printing... Canon... what a deal!
So I went down and bought one for about 130.00, unfortunately I didn't know it took a USB cable which wasn't included... there was another 30.00.
I took it home and it was wonderful, excellent print quality, quiet, easy to use.
Then when I started on my third set of cartridges about six months into it... I found that when I opened the ink cartridges the ink spilled all over my hands. Every time! Then it stopped printing a color... then when I deep cleaned it would use up a lot of ink... even worse it never unclogged. And then there was the 'you must have ink in all cartridges for any of them to be used'... HP doesn't make you do that, the color could be dead and the black would still work.
Canon's Internet service is impeccable. They were very helpful and sent me a new print head (which is replaceable and one of the reasons I wanted it) and when a color wouldn't come out they even sent me a new cartridge. However, they said, if it doesn't work after this then I need to take it into their local Canon repair dealer.
The local repair dealer is about ten to fifteen miles from me through a ton of traffic, and even then it could be a month or five until they could even help me.
I sorta need a printer that works within a few days to a week. Not months.
Sigh, I guess I'll see if the repair guy will fix it... and I'll have to dig out my old HP and see if it's still going.
Updated - I took my printer into the repair shop... I found out the only problem after all that was that I hadn't opened my cartridges up correctly (the repair man said he got 15 of them a month on this) There's a vent on the top that when you remove the orange tab by the writing, it allows oxygen in so the ink can flow through, he removed them from the cartridges in my printer and it works fine...
He also said that the ink spills out because it's shipped from a low altitude to a high altitude and to open the vent and cover it with a cloth and let it alone for a little while then carefully remove the orange cap and it should be okay.
He was frustrated that Canon hasn't worked on this, let alone that they didn't tell me to try this when I contacted them it would have saved me a month of frustration. Hopefully it will be a good printer now so I am changing my rating from 1 to 3 stars, I may be back in a month or so and rate it again.
