Canon PIXMA G4200 Wireless Mega Tank All-in-One Printer

I ordered this printer after the 6300 series PIXMA printer I had for almost 7 years died. I wanted to save on the cost of ink so I purchased this tank model. It was easy to set up and it printed ONE photo before it stopped printing black. I tried all the maintenance tips, called Canon (no response which is typical) and then spoke with a very knowledgeable Amazon tech.I decided in the end to return the printer. It prints VERY slow. Print quality is poor and the machine is flimsy. The key panel commands are not synchronized well. In order to return to the main menu you almost have to unplug the printer and start it again every time. I have had Canon cameras and L-series lens for over 40 years. I have had Canon printers for at least 10 years. In general, Canon products (with the exception of the glossy photo paper) are great products. What happened to quality on this one?

Great price and works well and best part "NO more Cartridge Issues". Ink is cheap so no need to not print.I do miss the auto double sided printing, but paper is relatively cheap

Update: While this is a decent printer, I do have to say that it is incredibly SLOW. If you haven't printed anything in awhile, be prepared to wait for a good 3-4 minutes just for the printer to wake up. Even if you just printed something and send a new document, it can take a minute or so to start printing. Seriously, it will just make a lot of loud noises and you'll think it's going to print, but then it will pause and just start making warm-up noises again. Very frustrating. It can also be really slow with larger file sizes. And those warm-up noises really are loud. So go make a snack and when you come back, it might be printing. That is, unless the heads are clogged and you come back to empty pages with a stripe of yellow on them.So, let's talk about the print heads getting clogged. If you haven't printed anything in over a week, plan on an extra 15 minutes to get the printer heads cleaned ... multiple times. That's assuming the basic cleaning solves the problem. I've had to clean them many times and three times have had to do the deep cleaning process that took more than 15 minutes and used up a lot of the ink. At least 30% of it for the cleanings I've had to do, which is WAY too much to lose for a cleaning process. Serious ripoff. It's starting to feel like that's the way that they make their money, by wasting the ink this way. Maybe they should design print heads that don't clog so easily that this process is required. I typically use the printer at least once a week, but not a lot. Still, it shouldn't do this, and the ink loss is really annoying, especially since that is the main selling point of this printer. I've never had a printer than clogged as much as this one does. Perhaps if you use it daily it won't do this, but it's still a poor design that they really need to fix.Oh, and for the cost of this printer there is absolutely NO excuse for the poor quality of the LCD screen on the printer. It's damn near impossible to read unless you have a light right above it. It should be color and bigger and much more legible. How that got past the testing phase is beyond me. It looks like something off a printer that's 10 years old. The designers and engineers got lazy. I have printers that are more than five years old with better screens than this.Canon has a ways to go to improve this printer.____________________________________Original review: So far, I like this printer. It was a bit more than I wanted to spend, but I'm sure I'll get that back with not having to buy stupid, over-priced ink cartridges. Seriously, for the price, you'd think they were filled with liquid gold.I've only done basic prints and some labels so far, but the text is clear and there haven't been any smudges or lines or blank areas. This printer had better reviews for photo printing than the similar Epson printer, so I'll test that soon as well. I've had many Epsons over the years, but after my last one died because I couldn't get one printer head unclogged, I'm done with them. I've had a couple of Canons as well and they've always lasted a long time.I ended up buying this model because it had a feed tray, so I will update my review as soon as I've had a chance to test that. I'm hoping it works well to scan a bunch of documents that I'd really like to get rid of. Yay for paperless!Also, it was a snap to connect this printer to my phone and iPad, so now I can print documents from my email right from those devices.Now I just need one of these printer manufacturers to make one of these for photo printing, with 6-7 ink tanks. That would be a dream. Wide format, please. Pretty, pretty please?

The great promise of these mega-tank printers is lowered dollars spent on ink. In this regard this printer from Canon is alright. The problem they have not resolved is how to prevent ink from drying in the print head if the printer is not used for periods of time. What exactly are 'periods of time'? It will depend on the environment where the printer lives. If it's how and dry the period will be shorter than if it's cool and humid.I bought one of these in Sept. 2017 for $380 as a home office printer. I generally like Canon printers because they have nice print drivers and are usually less fussy than other quality brands. We do not print consistently and can easily go a month or so without printing anything. Then we may have days a printing dozens or hundreds of pages. This is a bad situation for the G4000. In the early months the sound of it disgorging quantities of ink into its innards is disconcerting. Print quality became problematic requiring more maintenance operations which consume ink, take time and at generally annoying.In the roughly 3 1/2 years I have owned the printer I have bought 1 black and 1 yellow refill. And at this point the machine is looking pretty worthless. The print quality is terrible due to the black ink constantly clogging. I have tried all of the cleaning cycles to the point of encountering the 5B00 error which occurs when the cleaning counter hits a particular number and the printer locks up. The solution is to reset the counter (google it) or send to Canon for replacement waste ink pads. It's hard to imagine that's going to be cost effective. I would replace the pads myself but then the print head appears to be shot as well because of the dried ink.This machine would be appropriate in a setting where it gets frequent use. In other cases I'm not sure it actually works out even with the ridiculous cost of smaller ink tanks. Looking at the money spent on the printer and ink I can't say this 'saved' me any money over buying a $200 printer and the expensive ink.

I previously had a Canon Pixma MX860 which was a great printer--except for constantly buying replacement ink cartridges. When it finally died, I looked for another Canon and was drawn to this one (G4200) because of the Mega Tank feature. The print quality is great as is not buying ink frequently. So, it was a win on my two most important feature considerations.I, however, miss the front load paper tray, automatic double sided printing, and the backlit control panel. It is impossible to read without a flashlight.