Canon Pixma iP4700 review

Canon's Pixma iP4700 is the latest addition to a range that has won many Shopper awards in the past.

This single-function printer uses four dye-based inks for photo and colour printing and pigmented black ink for sharp text printing on plain paper. A separate print head should last the lifetime of the printer, but can be replaced if necessary.

The installer lets you choose any additional software you want along with the driver, which is easy to use. A Quick Setup tab puts the most important options in one place and you can choose from presets including Standard (plain A4 paper), photo (borderless glossy 6x4in) and paper saving (duplex). You can customise and save your own profiles, too.

Print quality is excellent, with solid, sharp black text at standard quality. Our mono text document printed at 7.8ppm. Draft text prints emerged at a reasonably fast 9.8ppm and were clear and sharp enough for day-to-day use, although lettering was a little thin. Our mixed-colour business documents looked great, with solid blocks of colour, sharp detail and smooth shading.

The iP4700 makes no compromises when it comes to photo quality, either. Although it has only four colours, prints look stunning. The dye-based black ink produces rich, intense dark tones, while skin colours and natural shades are reproduced with great accuracy. There's even a CD printing tray and a utility that makes it easy to print your own artwork on CDs and DVDs.

With print costs of 2.3p per mono page and 6.8p per page of mixed colour and black printing, the iP4700 doesn't cost too much to run. If you use Canon's Photo Paper Pro II, a 6x4in photo is a little expensive 39p, but we saw excellent results on Canon's cheaper photo papers, too.

The iP4700 doesn't add much to a winning formula. It doesn't cost too much to buy or run and it put in a respectable showing in our speed tests. If you don't need a multifunction inkjet but you do want something that can print outstanding photos as well as sharp documents, it's an ideal choice.