Canon Lasers imageCLASS MF4880dw Wireless Monochrome Printer with Scanner, Copier and Fax

May 28, 2014 update: I am not a computer geek and have very straightforward needs for a printer and do not want to spend a lot of time figuring out how to work it. This is my own personal printer in my office, and after a year, I do love it because it never jams, loads paper very easily, and responds immediately to printer controls, whether from a Word document or from the internet. This is a real workhorse and very dependable. We are home users of a laser printer, and our last one ran for over 20 years (actually still works but is super slow and sometimes cranky). The Canon was appealing to us because of the brand and price, under $200 including super saver shipping, and it did not disappoint. We know from experience with laser printers that it is important to shake up the cartridge before insertion in the printer to insure even printing. Then this should be done about every 500 copies or eventually copies will become streaked or blurred. Initial setup is very easy when following the instructions and removing every one of the orange plastic parts. My husband missed one and ran into error messages immediately. Apparently this is a common issue, and Canon technical support gets five stars for promptly diagnosing and fixing the problem. Although there is an installation CD included, my husband did not use it and instead went directly to the Canon website and downloaded the latest software version. In either case, until the software is loaded, the plug and play feature will not operate. If you plan to network the printer to more than one computer, you will have to download the software from the Canon website to each individual computer; each download only takes a couple of minutes. After that, interface is accomplished through your computer's print protocol and on ours was immediate and seamless. As far as the performance is concerned, printing is greased lightning fast, and the copies are crystal clear. We tried Xeroxing some documents, and the process is very user friendly, quick, and the copies are great. If and when we fax anything, this review will be updated. The energy saving feature is a nice touch, shutting down the display between uses. The printer's limited warranty is for one year; registration can be done on the Canon website. A Canon replacement cartridge (rated 4 ½ stars) for this printer sells on Amazon for $73.15 including super saver shipping and yields approximately 2,100 copies. Remanufactured cartridges are currently available through 4inkjets for $28.79 plus shipping, or buy two of them and get free shipping.

The HP that this replaced very nearly led to an "Office Space" style encounter with a baseball bat, so I am really grateful for the consistent and reliable performance. Print is crisp and fast, toner replacement is easy enough for those of us who are mechanically challenged. I really like using the duplex printing, I love the sheet feeder and I love the copy and scan speed. I've never had a paper jam in the sheet feeder or the printer (TAKE THAT, HP!). The only negative I've noticed is the output tray. The stop is not high enough to hold more than about 12 sheets. Very easy to set up on our in-house wireless network, no problems, no resetting everything in the place, no messing with it, it just worked. This is what we were promised with plug-and-play. The first time scanning took a few minutes to figure out, I ended up hard-wiring the destination computer. Pretty sure that was me, not the feature set, but I'm always in a hurry. That took me less than 5 minutes the first time and a few seconds after that. In an office with portable PC and Apple products, that's no big deal. Someday I'll go back and figure it out. As I said, it replaced a troublesome HP, I've also used Lexmark and Epson multi-functions before. I'm a Canon convert. UPDATE Over a year of trouble free ownership. Cranking it up to 5 STARS. Just went through a scanning and fax session for a deadline, and never even had to pull out the reference manual. The menu has logical and intuitive steps. This is a very small home office and the equipment is not often used for more than printing or occasional copying. No 'relearning' time required at all. This is a really great product.

My experience with this machine has been extremely poor. I would consider myself an advanced user in regards to driver installations, updates, and networked printing. The drivers and software included with the machine are the worst offenders, making it nearly impossible to intuitively interface with a PC for anything other than a simple print job. The print function is the only one that works consistently. While the print quality is fine, it is not anything to write home about. I have an inkjet printer that I kept for the rare color print jobs that does the job with very similar image quality and sharpness. This more expensive laser unit did not perform better, so I can't really include that as a "pro." We bought the machine more for the faxing and scanning properties and our printing volume is comparatively low, so I can't speak to the lifespan of the toner cartridges. The software experience and user interface on the machine itself are a complete mess. My computer recognized the machine as three separate devices, each with strange and unhelpful suffixes to the generic Canon Laser identifier. I had to manually spool printing jobs to the printer, selecting a different device each time until I had guessed the correct one. The scanner software and print option menus are full of spelling errors and are missing important features like DPI selection. The software is also slow to start up and becomes unresponsive at times when trying to communicate with the printer, both when connected via printer USB cable and wirelessly on the network. The scanning function does not work. I have tried initiating scans on both the machine and on the PC using the software, and they do not communicate at all, aside from failure and error messages. Documents do feed through the scanner but the job fails immediately after the scan completes. The main reason we purchased this unit was for the fax capabilities. We use Ooma Premier for our phone line, which has worked flawlessly with both phones and another fax machine we used to test out the functionality to ensure it would work properly. We were disappointed once again. While the initial tests I ran faxing to my office worked fine, we experienced major issues once our fax volume picked up significantly about 30 days after purchasing the unit, hence our inability to return it. The unit scans in documents properly, dials out and achieves a phone connection with the receiving party, but transmissions fail roughly 60% of the time. The success rate does not improve when lowering the quality of the transmissions or attempting to send fewer pages at a time. This machine is basically worthless to me in its current state. I have never had a poorer experience with any printer, scanner or fax machine. I would not recommend this to anyone, especially those who require a reliable fax and scanning solution for their business. As someone who is self-employed, I should be billing Canon for the hours of lost productivity.