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The PIXMA iP4700 is a tad smaller than the MP and MX range of Canon all-in-ones , 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 of the printer comes down and pulls out to become the output tray. The IP4700 can also be used for printing on to suitable CD & DVD’s
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 , one of which gives better results for text printing 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 . The company claims 9.2ppm for black pages and 8.1ppm for colour ones.
Our usual 5 page text document took about 45 seconds, which worked out to just under 7 pages per minute .
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 just over £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 wasn’t up to Canons normally high standard . 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 .
Colours for business graphics are bright with only slight dithering evident . Text registration over colour is also fine with no visible signs of white halos evident .
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 very difficult to see .
The five Canon ink cartridges are the only running 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 more expensivet , but the colour print is a full 2p per page less.
Verdict
The Canon Pixma iP4700 is a good quality, all purpose printer photo printing is very good . It’s quick, economical to run and has useful extra features like a duplexer and CD/DVD direct print. Black text was a slight let down , but is still perfectly adequate for day-to-day print tasks.
