Accessories

Not Impressed! Needs to work out some kinks.
I purchased this printer for my home office, and it has definitely helped to complete more tasks in a timely manner. However, there are still a lot of kinks to be worked out that would cause me to think twice about making the same choice again. My biggest problem with the unit is that it frequently claims to have paper jams when in reality it does not. I have to walk over to the unit, lift the cover the cover, and like magic, the jam is gone. The software seems to work just fine, but you does lose some functionality with a Mac. Good printer, but you may want to keep searching.

Directly connected to a PC, this printer is a winner
This printer replaced our old reliable HP 4L. It was time to upgrade to something that could do duplex printing. Finally there is a reasonably priced duplex printer available and the Canon MF4270 is it.

The other big selling point was that it could do simple copying without involving the computer. With the 4L, I had to start up a scanner program, scan the image, and then print it out from the PC.

For color (we have a separate color printer: Canon i960), the scanning software that comes with the printer is first rate: ScanSoft Omnipage 4. It is a very simple operation to scan one or more pages with or without the sheet feeder.

We have a local area network and the printer is hooked up to one computer which acts as a print server. We don't do that much scanning (mostly just printing and copying) so having to use that one computer to scan isn't a big deal.

Works very well as advertised for PC. Issues with Mac.
If you are using this machine with PCs, it is really a great machine that works exactly as advertised (At least with Windows XP). Some reviewers have complained that it does not scan over the network or to USB... but those are not listed features. Here are some points:

- It was easy to set up for both network print/fax and USB print/scan/fax.
- As a pure copier (without using a computer), it works great.
- As a pure fax machine (without using a computer), it works well. I've only used this function occasionally though.
- The sheet feeder works well (see small issue with scanning below).
- The machine comes out of standby fast, and prints pretty fast for a home office printer.
- The print quality is great.
- The scan quality is good... but I am not highly demanding when it comes to scanners... I use it mostly for business use.
- I have a small issue with the scanner while using the sheet feeder... it seems to sometimes stretch the image slightly in an uneven way. This is not a big issue for business documents, and not an issue at all with the flatbed scanning. This also could just be due to not positioning the sheet feeder guides exactly right. However, for photos I will use the flatbed, not the sheet feeder.
- Overall, a great home office machine. It has not jammed on me once in a few months of use (albeit fairly light use)

Also, there have been complaints of it "freezing" in standby. This was happening to me as well, but Canon has released a firmware update that fixes the problem. I installed the update (which was pretty easy to do), and now I no longer have the "freezing" problem.

The one caveat in all of this, is that I think there are real issues with using this machine with a Mac. I do not have much Mac experience, but my girlfriend has a new Mac. I tried to install the driver from the Canon website, but when we tried to print something the printer beeped, then it took about a minute or two to print each page. The last page didn't even print. Perhaps it is an issue with a specific version of MAC OS, but I do not know enough about Macs to know.

Good printer, but netowrk problems
This printer starts fast and the print quality is good. The half full starter toner is kind of a rip-off.

I had a problem with this printer on my network where it would go into sleep mode and somehow hang my entire network. I was able to stop this from happening by turning off the printer sleep mode, but it stinks that the printer never goes into sleep mode. I believe it is due some weird interaction between the 4270 and the Tivo I have on my network. I sepnt some time on the phone with canon, and they were polite and actually pretty technical, but had no solution.

Good, but doesn't live up to its potential
This device has great potential: it prints, copies, and duplexes well; the phone support is good. Unfortunately, poor software/firmware prevents it from living up to its potential:
Although there is a Stop button, stopping a print job is a multi-step process. Also, other buttons (e.g. 2-sided) do not apply to printing;
While there are Profiles that enable you to customize the printer for different tasks, some Profile settings, such as the Binding Location, are preserved only for the default profile;
Received FAXes cannot be moved to the computer for previewing, etc.;
There is no (Canon) software to use the scanner to copy to another printer, e.g., one with color (of course, one can scan to a file and then print the file);
It stops printing prematurely when toner is low (it prints perfectly when the cartridge is lifted enough to break contact and then reinserted);
When you scan to a jpeg file, you can't control the jpeg quality;
Also, driver updates can appear without release notes.
Canon Support has confirmed the above "features", and does not consider them bugs. (There are other issues, of course, such as limited MAC support, that other reviewers have pointed out.)