Canon PIXMA IP4000 Photo Printer Review & Calculating Its True Cost of Ownership

By Christy Berger

Canon PIXMA iP4000 printer is more than a home inkjet printer as it makes color and black & white printing in high speed possible and provide very high resolution. With its two-sided printing function, Canon PIXMA iP4000 reduces your paper costs. Direct printing from cameras is also possible with Canon PIXMA iP4000 printer. It has no memory card slots.

Here are some of the specifications and features of Canon PIXMA IP4000:

* Direct print port & PictBridge compatibility (PictBridge is an important feature that is good to have on a inkjet printer that you print a lot of pictures)

* USB and parallel interfaces; PC and Mac compatible

* Color resolution up to 4,800 x 1,200 dpi & black resolution up to 600 x 600 dpi (This is a pretty high resolution for home use)

* Up to 25 ppm black, 17 ppm color; 4-by-6-inch photo in about 36 seconds (of course this is assuming draft mode printing, but even normal printing is pretty fast for a photo printer

* ContrastPLUS 5-color ink system; built-in two-sided printing (again great for a home printer, you probably will not use it a lot but still is good to have)

* Printer ink cartridges: BCI-3eBk, BCI-6Bk, BCI-6C, BCI-6M, BCI-6Y (good cartridge models that you can easily find inexpensive compatibles for, below we will show why this is so important)

* Paper handling (standard): Letter, legal, 4" x 6", 5" x 7", U.S. #10 envelopes

* Nozzle configuration: Black: 320, Color: 512 x 2 (C, M), 256 x 2 (Y); Total Nozzles: 1856

Here what comes in the regular box: Canon PIXMA iP4000 Printer, Canon PIXMA iP4000 Printhead, BCI-3eBk Black ink cartridge, BCI-6Bk Black ink cartridge, BCI-6C Cyan ink cartridge, BCI-6M Magenta ink cartridge, BCI-6Y Yellow ink cartridge, Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy 4" x 6" Sample Pack, power cord, documentation kit, Setup Software & User's Manual CD-ROM

The street price of this printer ranges between $110 and $164 but this is only a part of the story as we all know. It is the supplies that will make the bulk of the cost of ownership. Since Canon PIXMA IP4000 printer uses cartridges that you can easily find compatible generic cartridges online, the true cost of ownership will be pretty reasonable.

This is how we calculate cost of ownership of a printer: "number of prints per month" times "cost of the printer cartridge" divided by "the yield of the printer cartridge".

For example, lets assume that you will print 50 photos per month using this printers ink cartridge set that yields about 75 photos and a set of cartridges cost $28 for compatibles and $85 for genuine Canon brand ink cartridges. The monthly "cost of ownership" is then
(50 photos) x ($28) / 75 pages = $19 / month while using compatible cartridges and (50 photos) x ($85) / 75 pages = $57 / month.

This article is prepared by Christy Berger from MyOfficePortal.org. A longer version of this article can be found at Canon PIXMA IP 4000 Inkjet Photo Printer Review. Main resource of this article is Canon PIXMA IP4000 Photo Printer Ink Cartridges at PrintCountry.