Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My trusty Pixma iP5200 bit the dust a few weeks ago due to an unknown problem. It always functioned well, and was very reliable and produced excellent results. I depended on it for all my regular printing, especially the hidden feature for printing on CD/DVD discs. They came out beautifully in about 30 seconds. It was time to move on and upgrade. Or so I thought. First, I had to wonder why Canon produced the Pixma iP5200 several years before the new iP4700 came along. What's up with that?! Nevermind. I went ahead and ordered the 4700. After receiving it and setting up, I discovered several troubling things. I noticed it takes forever to start up when you send it a print job. Several minutes at least, all the while spewing wasted ink during way too many cleaning cycles. And if the unit wasn't already turned on, it was reported as Offline by the computer and has to be manually powered on, not very user-friendly! To add insult to injury, Canon doesn't seem to be getting paid enough for their ink cartridges, and so, to improve revenues, has reduced the newer CLI-221 cartridge capacity to a mere 9 mL of ink, and drained the PGI-220 to only 19 mL. The older CLI-8's had 13.6 mL in them, and the PGI-5 Bk had 26 mL! That's over 30% less ink you are paying the same amount of money for, and the printer goes through more cleaning cycles than it's predecessors did. You do the math! The last straw for me was finding out that the printer does not print CD/DVD discs. This was a very important feature to me. Units sold in Europe are endowed with this capability as a standard feature. I was able to utilize the hidden feature in my previous iP5200 by reprogramming it for Euro mode, and using CDLabelPrint (which, by the way, works wonderfully and can print all the way to the 17mm center hole!). Bottom line, I ended up selling the printer 1 week after purchasing it to a friend who did not need the CD/DVD printing feature, and acquiring a Canon iP4500 legacy printer (the very last model produced which does CD/DVD printing, now sadly discontinued). Beware of this unit's limitations. It will print very high quality photos, and does fast and crisp text. However, your consumables costs for ink are going to much higher (unless you know how to refill using quality inks), and the issues with no CD/DVD option and refusing to print from a power-off state pushed it over the edge for me.