Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Update (11/4/2019): I downgraded this printer from 4 stars to 2 stars. In summary, this printer works well as a dumb printer, hooked up to USB for printing and does print good quality prints. However, as others have mentioned with their frustrations on getting the printer to work, they are not exaggerating. I had originally set this printer to print using my wireless connection which worked well initially. Then days later, the printer indicated that the IP address changed (the printer does not automatically find the new IP). So, when trying to print, the printer encountered an error state. Because a print had failed, I couldn't uninstall the print driver as the computer would show a print was in progress. Luckily, I restored my computer to an image to the time before I bought the computer and reinstalled the driver, this time using a wired ethernet connection. That worked fine for months til today. Once again, after turning on, the printer said the IP changed. Trying to print led again the the error state message. This time, since it's been months before I bought this computer, I couldn't just restore my computer from an image. I see where some owners of this printer consider it total junk and a big mistake of a purchase. I feel their pain. After some digging around on the internet, I did find a way to uninstall the driver. The key is to reset and clear the print spooler. Since I really don't have a need to print wirelessly, using this printer as just a dumb printer and connect by USB meets my needs I did the following: 1) Reset and cleared the print spooler, 2) Uninstalled the Cannon printer driver using Window's control panel and 3) Reinstalled printer driver to connect by USB. On Windows, there are different methods to reset and clear the print spooler. From manually to executable bat files to a GUI program called PrintQueueCleaner. Doesn't matter which method as long as the spooler gets reset and cleared. Otherwise, the driver won't uninstall and the printer is stuck in an error state. ----------------------------------- Original Review Follows: I've owned this printer for almost two weeks with mix results. The good: I bought this for under $200 total which I think is a good deal. Printing on both sides is great. It prints fast and sharp. I've printed out JPG photos on regular copier paper the prints out good. Other documents like a printout of a bill with color came out really nice. The bad: Set up is touchy with not to easy to understand instructions. As and example, the manual describes three ways to connect. Wirelss LAN, Wired LAN or USB. Then pages go in pretty detail about how setting up wirelessly can leak data. Plus, there are topics on setting up ports which after reading, I found too technical. I ran into a couple of snags when using over the past couple of weeks. The first snag was I had set color correction (which really isn't described in detail in the manual) to auto check. So, while printing about a 350 page document, the printer would print some, then do an auto check on the color and think something wasn't perfect so would print again. In other words, it would print about 100 pages, then think something was off, and print the 100 pages again. Despite when examining, they looked fine. Another issue with set up is the drivers. My first choice was to set up wirelessly. I didn't have any easy type router so had to enter select my SSID and entered the passcode. This worked fine until I tried using the printer again a few days. I had a message on the LCD saying the printer P has changed. So couldn't print. I maybe could have changed a setting on the PC to point to the proper IP. Not sure. So I then decided to instead of wireless, connect up wired. But ran into a problem and I couldn't remove the drivers or print as got messages about a print job in progress or something but couldn't uninstall drivers. Others have mentioned a similar problem. Mainly, for me. First installing wirelessly, then trying wired messed something up and i couldn't just unistall the driver. Luckily I remembered that I use Macrium Reflect to make backups of my entire system. I restored my PC back to before I bought the printer and then installed using a wired LAN setup and the drivers installed just fine. I rate this printer 3.5 stars overall. Nice print quality, good value. But installing can be frustrating and cumbersome. Meets my needs as I'm okay with using set up as wired just to get color printing and probably won't use other features like printing from phone.