9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
A mixed bag
Date of Review: Feb 17, 2009
The Bottom Line: Economical & versatile but network feature not ready for primetime
Considering its $200 price at Best Buy, you get a very versatile machine. It can automatically make a two-sided copy from a two-sided original. Printing speed is easily 7 or 8 pages a minute in real-world use. Dual paper trays, in back and underneath, permit two kinds of paper, or just twice as much paper. With the little color LCD display you can print straight off the memory card slots or from a Pictbridge-compatible camera through the front USB port.
Make sure you have room for it. Its footprint is quite imposing, and, because the controls and the print output are along the long edge, it hogs lineal edge-of-desk frontage. It will not fit atop a file cabinet. Relying on the network feature, I put it atop a bookcase.
It takes four Canon "5" style ink cartridges for the color, plus a big "8" style black cartridge. That's not the cheapest ink out there, but not horrible either. At least Canon tells you how much ink (15 mL or whatever) you are getting. You can change each color separately. There is aftermarket ink and refill kit available you are cost-conscious.
I have used it on Windows XP and Mac, and it works, less the caveats I mention below. Use under Linux, as a network printer anyhow, is bleeding edge. I can print in Linux up to 600dpi but I had to update to a recent version of CUPS (Ubuntu Hardy is too old, you must have 8.08 Intrepid) and compile the BJNC tarball. There are reports of network scanning working but I don't need that feature so I didn't really try that myself.
The ADF is really suited only for 8.5" wide paper. When I chopped a book off its binding and fed the 6" sheets into the ADF the scans were crooked.
There are several gaps in the feature set. You can scan 2-sided for copies but you can't scan 2-sided from the PC. You can look at photos on the LCD display but not unprinted faxes. You can connect a camera to the front USB port, but not a USB flash memory stick. You can print from memory cards but can't scan to them.
The most overbilled feature, though, is the network interface. If you think you can just plug this thing in, configure it with your web browser, and then install as a modern SMB/Windows printer or an IPP printer you will be disappointed. It uses a proprietary network protocol called "BJNC" that looks like a 1990's flashback, the days when network printers never worked and you wanted your own dot-matrix printer back. This BJNC uses UDP port 8611 so anything on your network that won't pass UDP (NAT routers for example) will block access to this printer. The network set-up requires you to connect the ethernet and the USB at the same time, often a nearly impossible wiring job. You can then disconnect the USB. You then have to install special network drivers (logged in as administrator of course) for every computer that wants to use it.
Network scanning is also half-baked. Think you can scan something using the buttons and then fetch it from your web browser? Ha, ha, very funny. For that matter, features available from the buttons (2 sided scans) are missing from the network drivers.
I managed to wrestle this thing into working well enough for me, but if network interface is the deciding feature for you, you are probably better off with a "JetDirect" style mini printer server, or maybe a USB-over-ethernet extender.
