Versatile and Very Good

My hp 7760 was getting long in the tooth. Actually I was getting bored with it and decided to get a new printer. A poor reason but what the hey. I looked through all the printer reviews I could find and the ip4300 seemed, if not in the top 3 spots, at least in the top ten. To be fair, this printer was up against many that were at least twice to three times the price. For an under $100 printer that pretty good!

I got mine for around $60 bucks from some discount site, 2nd day shipping included. Opening the box, the printer was well secured but without a usb cable. No problem, I used the one from my old printer but Canon should have included one.

Setting it up was easy enough if you follow the directions and take your time. Once the unit was loaded with ink, paper and the software installed, it did its calibration and was ready to go.

The are 3 1 good points about this printer. First the separate ink tanks are fairly big - with a double sized black cartridge and each one as a light under it! Kinda neat to look out except the cover is always closed on it. I wonder why they have the lights?

Second is the dual paper feed. You can feed paper via the slot tray at the bottom or pile a stack on the top vertical feeder. Woohoo! No more changing paper when I want to print photos. I put the regular paper in the slot tray and when I want to print some pix I flip up the top lid and load it with the photo paper. Doing it this way prevents dust from gathering into the top sheet feeder if you use it for general paper use.

The third item is the duplex printing. In a sub $100 printer this is almost unheard of. The bad point however is that using the duplex function will make printing slower. Not that the print heads move slower but that the process of feeding the paper back into the unit for back side printing takes a few seconds. So if you're in a rush, just print one sided sheets.

The last item, the 1 I mentioned above is the ability of the unit to print on cd's. You'll have to buy the F tray from ebay or other web sites. Instructions on how to set up the unit for cd printing are very simple. Remove a little piece of plastic where the F tray will be inserted, make a little registry tweak and press some buttons on the front of the printer in a certain order. It was so easy that a klutz like me did in right the first time.

But who cares about all these bells and whistles. Does the unit print good is the big questions. My answer is a big yes. The only thing you will get from a more expensive printer is a faster printer time but not better quality and to get better quality you would have to pay at least more money. The prints are very good, clear with good color. The inks are rated for about 100 year life and they dry very quickly. You can actually handle the print within minutes after it is produced. I am no expert but for the average person on the street, nuances that any professionals expound upon are lost. We're talking high end differences, way beyond what grandma, your sister or anyone who is not in the photographic field can tell. I doubt they can tell the difference without side by side comparisons and a magnifying glass. So for us, this as very very good.