Is the Canon PIXMA iP4700 any good?

The PIXMA iP4700 is a tad smaller than the MP and MX range of  Canon all-in-one printers  , but still couldn’t be described as small. 

 The machine is similar to it’s all-in-one cousins when it comes to the paper trays, of which it has two.  . Canon recommends you load photo paper into the rear tray and plain paper into the cassette, but the rear tray will take either.

The front panel of the machine folds down and extends to become the output tray and there’s an internal fold-down cover that opens to reveal a slot for inserting the CD/DVD carrier, as the machine can print directly on suitably coated discs. 

 On the right hand side of the printer there is a  power buttons and a feed button. There is a PictBridge socket, but no memory card slots which seems a little strange  .

The printer takes 5 ink cartridges, with two blacks including a pigmented ink for better text print on plain paper. They all clip into a semi-permanent print head and the  printer  performs automatic head alignment on request. 

Canon deserves extra brownie points for quoting speeds according to the ISO standard, which gets a lot closer to what you  actually get, unlike some if its rivals   .  Canon claim  9.2ppm for black pages and 8.1ppm for colour ones.

Our five-page black text  file  completed in 44 seconds, giving an actual print speed 8.2ppm, and the longer 20-page test piece took 3mins 1sec giving a slightly reduced speed of 6.63ppm. It’s unusual to have a longer document producing a slower speed, but this can be explained by random pauses, presumably for print head maintenance, which were more prevalent on the longer run . 

The 5-page black text and colour graphics document produced a speed of 4.76ppm and when we  tried   the printer’s duplexer, this dropped to 2.95 sides per minute. Photo prints are particularly quick, with a Standard quality print coming through in just over 30 seconds, well up with the best in the business .

All these speeds are good for a printer costing  around   £80 and they  perform   well against printers and all-in-ones from other suppliers, which  are quite a bit more expensive.

The plain text print quality isn’t quite what we’ve come to expect from Canon .  With a little feathering evident on some text characters  , caused by a little bleed of ink into the paper fibres.  This is not normally a problem for Canon, so it is a little strange to see it on this machine  .

 Graphics colours  are bright with only subtle dither patterns . Text registration over colour is also good with no visible signs of white halos .  

 Photo prints on Canon photo paper are good with very natural colours  , though darker areas of images are a bit too dark, losing some detail. There’s little point in  opting  for the slightly slower High quality print as differences between this and Standard quality are  not noticable at first glance  .

The five Canon ink cartridges are the only  consumable  costs in this machine and are available at very competitive rates if you shop around. We calculate page costs for an ISO black page at 3.16p and for a colour one, 8.18p, both figures including 0.7p for paper. Comparing the costs with the similarly priced Epson Stylus Photo P50, using oem epson ink cartridges the black print cost is slightly higher , but the colour print is a full 2p per page less.

Verdict

The Canon Pixma iP4700 is a good quality, general-purpose inkjet printer with a penchant for photo printing . It’s quick, cheap to run and has useful extra features like a duplexer and CD/DVD direct print. Black text print wasn’t the best we’ve seen from a Canon machine , but is still perfectly adequate for day-to-day print tasks.