12 out of 12 people found this review helpful.
Nice printer, bad cartridges
Date of Review: May 10, 2007
The Bottom Line: Unless Canon re-engineers the chipset on the ink cartridges so that they are reliable, avoid this AIO. If the cart problem were fixed, it would be a great little unit.
This AIO has a lot of nice features, particularly duplex printing. Unfortunately, I have had nothing but problems with the ink carts. Less than a month after purchase, an error message said the cyan cart was bad. And sometimes it said I had two cyan carts installed (huh?) Uninstalling and reinstalling the cart sometimes solved the problem (or gave a different error message). I emailed Canon, and they sent me a new cart. That solved the problem, except shortly thereafter the yellow cart and the magenta cart started giving the same error messages. Yeah, I tried unplugging, reloading the carts, loading them one by one, chanting, standing on my head, etc.
But here's the worst part; if there is a problem with an ink cart, the entire unit is crippled. Need to send a fax? Uh-uh. Scan something? Nope. So, just because one cart has a bad chipset, the whole unit is useless. How stupid is that? Well, it's not stupid at all if you want to make sure your customers have to buy carts from you no matter what they want to do with the printer. And, why limit sales to people who have used up the ink in the cart? If the carts malfunction while still half-full, you can sell twice as many! Hurray!
And, no, you won't be finding good third-party carts anytime soon. The ones that are out there require you to pry the chipset off your OEM cart and install it on theirs. But that's the same chipset that is causing all the problems! Hmmmm, do you think the whole problem is that the chipsets are designed to have a short MTBF so that such chip-swapping is difficult to impossible? Thus, the consumer has no choice but to buy Canon carts! Hurray...uh, I mean, crud.
So, other than being a nice paperweight to toss my mail onto, it's a loser. Canon tech support has been very cooperative, but this machine is totally unreliable because of the ink cart issue. And making it shut down all functions just because one cart is allegedly bad? Yikes.
I really like the features of this unit. It has everything I wanted in an AIO. But alas, all the feature sets in the world are useless if it sits there blinking mindlessly, "Check ink cart".
