Canon Pixma iP4500 Inkjet Photo Printer – Acceptable General Purpose Single Function

Pros

The Canon Pixma iP4500 inkjet photo printer offers pretty good overall print quality, has got en-suite auto duplexer, has PictBridge Port and has two paper sources.

Cons

The Pixma iP4500 doesn’t have a preview LCD and memory card slots.

Introduction

The Canon Pixma iP4500 inkjet photo printer is a single-function printer for modern homer users and is reasonably priced for them. The Canon Pixma iP4500 doesn’t have the memory card slots and neither does have a preview LCD, and this is what separates this printer from Canon’s photo-oriented single function printer Pixma iP6700d. Priced at $130 the iP4500 is an upgrade from iP3500 that we review recently. The best thing about iP4500 is that the printer offers a little better print quality, quicker print speed and slightly more features including the en-suite auto duplexer.

In general the Canon Pixma iP4500 is a decent printer, but if your needs are limited then we think you should go for a comparatively cheaper yet potent iP3500 priced at $80, this not only will save you some money, but at the same time will fulfill your needs. But if you think you can justify the price of iP4500 with your printing needs then it definitely is a decent option to go with.

Design

The Canon Pixma iP4500 has a pretty straightforward design and most of the body of the printer is primarily black, with very little silver accents. The Pixma iP4500 measures 11.9 inches deep by 6.3 inches tall by 17.5 inches wide, and weighs around 15.2 pounds. The control panel of the printer hosts very few features and the ones that we found here includes power and feed/cancel buttons, an input source button and a PictBridge USB port which switches between the paper trays.

One thing that we liked about Pixma iP4500, is that the printer actually gives you two paper input options: first being the conventional rear input which opens from the top rear edge of Pixma iP4500, and the second being the cassette which pulls our from front/bottom. Both the input trays of Pixma iP4500 can hold up to 150 plain pages of paper. Canon suggests placing the inflexible media like photo paper in the rear input tray, as paper in the bottom input box is meant to bend around a roller. Both the rear and bottom input trays of the printer have modifiable paper guides, so you can input a wide range of paper sizes. A panel located at the front of the printer folds out to serve as the output tray.

The Canon Pixma iP4500 makes use of a five-ink system: for better text prints there is pigment black and for superior color blending and graphics there are the yellow, dye-based black, magenta and cyan.

The feature set for Canon Pixma iP4500 inkjet photo printer is quintessential basic. The Pixma iP4500 only has single connection option in the form of USB, though if you want to connect the printer to a network you always can use a printer server. Apart from this the printer offers a fitted duplexer for repeated double-sided prints, but if you want manual duplexing then the print driver gives you that option as well. Even though the memory card slots are absent from Pixma iP4500 but the printer does have a PictBridge USB port facilitating direct printing from PictBridge cameras and other devices.

System Configuration

Price: $299.99
Manufacturer: Canon USA
Part Number: 2171B002
Printer Type: Ink-jet – Color Photo printer
Operating System Supported: Microsoft Windows 2000,   Microsoft Windows XP,   Apple MacOS X 10.2.8 – 10.4 and Microsoft Windows Vista
Copier Type: None
Dimensions (W x D x H): 17.2 x 11.9 x 5.7 inches

System weight: 0.8 lbs
Connectivity Technology: Wired
Software Included: Drivers & Utilities
Direct Printing Specifications: PictBridge
Supported Media Type: DVD discs,  CD discs,  Photo paper,  Envelopes,  Photo stickers,  Plain paper,  Iron-on transfers, Semi-gloss paper,  Glossy photo paper,  Matte photo paper and High resolution paper
Inkjet Technology: Canon FINE (Full-lithography inkjet Nozzle Engineering)
Microsoft Certifications: Certified for Windows Vista

Performance

Considering the fact that the Canon Pixma iP4500 is a general purpose single function printer, the Pixma iP4500 is a tad over expensive. So it has to be good in performance if it has to make any impression in market. In our performance testing, the Pixma iP4500 printed black text at 8.25 pages per minute, which was slower than office-oriented HP OfficeJet Pro K5400, but at the same time was faster than the home-oriented HP DeskJet 6940. But the printer disappointed big time in graphic printing tests and printed only 2.47 pages per minute. The results for photo printing tests were a little better with the printer printing at 2.66 pages per minute; it was faster than the DeskJet 6940 and Pro K5400. The Pixma iP4500 also excelled the comparatively less expensive iP3500 in all the printing tasks that we subjected it to.

Apart from speed the quality tests also proved iP4500 a pretty decent printer and the Canon Pixma iP4500 printed nice and dark text prints in our tests. Although, if you do in deep there was few jagged edges, but that certainly can be neglected. The same case was with the graphics prints, and it showed pleasing sharp and saturated prints. The photo quality for 4 x 6 prints was again acceptable overall. So, on a whole the Canon Pixma iP4500 is a decent printer for the everyday printing needs, and in terms of quality it was clearly better than iP3500.

Support

The Canon Pixma iP4500 is backed by a standard one year warranty from Canon. In addition, there also is the toll-free support available on weekdays from 8 a.m. to midnight PT and from 7 am to 5 pm PT on Saturdays. You also can get 24 x 7 E-mail support through a web-based form. The standard online support option for the printer includes downloadable software and drivers, FAQs and manuals.

Word from the Experts

The Canon Pixma iP4500 offers acceptable performance, both in terms of speed and quality, but the printer is a tad too pricey for the basic home consumers. But if you do a lot of printing even at your home, then this is a decent printer with acceptable speed and quality.