TUNE DIGITALLY

Review by Phyllis Rhodes:

I recently purchased this printer in an effort to free up more space in my home office. I replaced my laser printer, scanner and fax with this single compact unit and couldn't be happier. As others have mentioned, the duplex printing feature is a MAJOR plus in my opinion - a feature that they've seemed to include as a "freebie" and adds major points over competitors. The quick start guide was really simple and I was up and running in a matter of minutes.

A super quiet machine when not in use (thanks to the Energy Saving feature), I've used the printing features and the results are timely, crisp, clean pages with seemingly excellent paper handling (no jams so far). It's got many more print options (2 on 1 page, 4 on 2 pages which is really 4 on 1 with the duplex option) and a ton of other cool features and capabilities that aren't listed in the product description. I have sent and received faxes without a problem. Copying is just like using the larger machines: just lift the cover or use the document feeder to copy originals. I haven't scanned anything yet, so I can't comment on that particular functionality, but the manual mentions scanning to PDF which is what I really need and like.

Size is truly relative - It is a bit larger (height and width) than my old laser printer (a Samsung); but does 4 times more work and its footprint is definitely smaller than the three units I replaced!

For less than 0 with free shipping, it's solved my space problems and exceeded my expectations regarding functionality and quality. A great deal, imo. I highly recommend!!

Review by bayareakirk:

Awesome:

1. Very quiet.

2. Goes in to hibernate quickly to save energy and bursts back to life instantly when needed.

3. Great print quality.

4. Does it all (except for color)including fax, copy, scan, and duplex printing.

5. Duplex printing saves a lot of resources (paper and money).

6. Most of the settings and buttons are user friendly.

Not so awesome:

1. The manual that comes with it is nice and easy to read and use, but skips too many "advanced features". For advanced features you must look at the online .pdf guides.

2. Even with the advanced guide, it is not immediately obvious to me how to set up the machine so it will screen calls as phone or fax. It wants to answer all calls as a fax machine. I need to experiment more with the available (but confusing) settings that should fix this.

I like having a do it all printer but also realized I no longer need or want color. Here's why:

1. Printing photos at home is not what the marketing would like us to believe. Sending photos to Kodak or Shutterfly (or any online photo printer) is cheaper, of better quality, and of more archival quality than printing at home. It also offers more choices of print size and paper quality and so forth. It's just not quite as fast. Email the photos in and have them in a few days or a week at most.

2. Color inkjet printers do not work well long enough. They frustrate me as contributing too greatly to our throw away society. It is cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy ink, print heads and other needed repairs that come up after a year or two of use.

This Canon is great and it is unreal that it lists at such a low price for the quality and functions you get.

Review by hiway12:

I bought this printer over better reviewed color laser multi-functions because of my good experience with the b&w Canon MF4270. my large format color HP died, so now I needed color and color MF's had scaled in price and size. Setup was easy enough, although the menus were deep and complicated. just finding how to set up Distinctive Ring required a call to tech support and I never call tech support. But I felt better when the question stumped two techs. Then the problems began, the next morning the machine disconnected from the USB connection after entering 'Sleep' mode requiring a reboot of the printer. Then I spent two hours a day with Canon tech support, every day since receiving the printer and they couldn't fix it. Next I was unable to set paper defaults, every print job involving the MF tray requires user input and I couldn't print more than one page of anything (checks, letterhead, etc) because placing more than one sheet in the MF tray causes a 'jam' every single time. Canon clearly states this possible but in reality it does not work. Canon's solution to turn off any default thereby requiring direct input from me to menu thru and tell the printer what kind of media I was inserting. Crazy, right? you must also 'wake' the printer to begin any task except receiving faxes. it's also really noisy, a print job finishes and printer grinds on and on. I will say the color output was excellent.

I returned it and now have a Brother MFC9320CW that does everything with zero input on my part and it's wireless and a couple of bucks cheaper.

Review by B. Fugly:

I thought this MFP would be a little easier to use from reading pre-reviews and Canon's hype. It takes a while to wake up and is quite noisy. In order to use an envelope one has to fumble through the LCD menu to set it for envelopes. Print quality is good but it certainly takes a a while to spit out the 1st page. I had to turn the sleep mode timer all the way up so it doesn't take as long. If you have this in your work area, expect it to be noisy. When I print from a network printer I cannot do any other task on that computer until the job finishes spooling, quite annoying, none of our other network MFPs cause that. It is a competitively priced unit initially but a complete toner change is 72% the cost of a new rig. I think I would spend the extra money on a higher end unit, I like our Brother MFP but it was black & white and we needed a splash of color.

Review by M. Madej:

I bought the Canon imageCLASS MF3240 about a month ago, and so far it has exceeded my expectations. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who is in the market for a multifunction device without the need to print in color. If you prefer getting your digital photos printed by an online or in-store photo processor, a laser multifunction is usually the way to go -- since it's a lower cost per page, it's faster, and the output is better quality than an inkjet.

APPEARANCE/CONSTRUCTION:

You can tell that it's a sub-0 machine by the construction. Don't expect the same kind of solid feel that you'll get from a much more expensive piece of equipment. A few of the plastic parts feel a little flimsy, like the paper tray. But they all seem to work fine, and I don't have any concerns about durability. Unless you're really tough on your office equipment, you should be ok.

The MF3240 isn't the sexiest looking multifunction out there (if you're looking for a great looking device, try the Canon PIXMA MP830, which uses inkjet technology so you can print in color too). In fact, my wife keeps saying the MF3240 looks like a cooler sitting on the desk. But the buttons are laid out logically on the keypad, and from the investigating I've done into a lot of different multifunction devices, the footprint on this one seems to be a reasonable size.

PERFORMANCE:

So far, so good. If you're really a stickler for the highest output possible -- if you need the most crisp, darkest text and flawless images -- this probably isn't the machine for you. Don't get me wrong...the output is very good, borderline excellent. But you can tell that it wasn't printed on a ,000 heavy-duty laser printer.

This baby is fast! Total time for the first page to arrive in my hand after clicking the Print button (including warmup time) was 13 seconds. It's considerably faster warming up than my old HP laser printer.

It's not the quietest machine I've ever heard, but I wouldn't call it too loud either.

It has a toner saver mode, but I'd call this an annoyance. You're supposed to be able to set the toner saver either directly on the printer control panel or through the printer driver. I've tried a number of times to set up two profiles: one that uses toner saver and another that doesn't. It works sometimes, but other times it'll end up in the wrong mode. Even when I get it to work, I don't notice much of a difference in output between toner saver mode and the regular mode.

I've also been having a minor problem with the fax. I have the MF3240 hooked up to my phone line, and a phone extension hooked into the fax machine. The fax machine is set in Manual mode, so it shouldn't do anything unless I take action on my own. But I've had one or two phone calls on the extension that's hooked up to the fax where the machine hangs up on the person I'm talking to after about 10 minutes! If I can't get this problem to stop, I may end up getting a splitter for the phone line and hooking the phone extension into the line separately.

SOFTWARE:

It comes bundled with a light version of OCR software. I tried it once, and it seemed to recognize every single word on the page I scanned. I was quite impressed -- much better than older versions of OCR I've tried (although I must admit this is the first OCR software I've tried in at least 6-7 years, so I'm sure the technology is much better now).

It also installs a piece of software called Canon Multifunction Toolbox 4.9. This is the most pleasant surprise I've experienced with this printer so far. It allows you to click one button, go through a couple simple settings, and then get a scan and go straight to an e-mail, or straight to a PDF, etc. The smartest feature is that it allows you to pick a target file size, and it'll adjust the resolution to achieve that file size. So it eliminates trying to scan something and then finding out the resulting file is 20MB, then needing to go back and re-scan it at a lower resolution before you e-mail it. You simply pick your target file size (let's say 1MB) and the software will scan your document at the proper resolution to achieve that file size. Very smart!

OVERALL:

Amazon has even knocked ten dollars off the price since I bought it...now it's going for about one hundred fifty bucks...so it's an even better value today. This is a very good multifunction device for light/moderate home or home office use. Given the chance to do it all over, I'd definitely buy the MF3240 again.

Review by C. LI:

Pros:

- Inexpensive (I paid 5.99/free shipping here at Amazon which is amazing considering all the functions I get from this solid machine)

- Good computer printing... it does what a b/w laser printer is supposed to: great on text and ok on graphics. It does a comparable job as my previous HP LJ1100 laser printer. Internal paper tray which holds 250 pages is an improvement over my HP.

- Appropriate scanning result. Good for document archiving purpose. I tried to scan an old color photo and print it in another color inkjet printer. The result is beyond my expectation.

- Copier does what it is supposed to. Pretty easy to operate and configure different settings.

Cons:

- FAX function in general is a dispointment. First, if I connect the printer with my phone (i.e.,in-line or serial), the printer "wakes up" from idle mode whenever I pick up the phone. I have to use a splitter to avoid this nuisance. As a result, I pretty much need to set it to Manual mode for FAX. Also, as other people mentioned, there is no auto feeder for FAX. Fortunately I only use FAX occasionally.

- A little too loud for my taste. I have seen many other models that are much quieter than this.

Bottom line:

If you are like myself who does not use FAX that frequently, you will love this unbelivable bargain. It does everything I used to get done at Kinko's at 6!

Review by Yi Feng:

Overall, this is a good all-in-one laser printer for its price in consumer class printers. Here are some detailed comments.

1. The automatic paper feeder is well designed - the situation that multiple pages go-through at once never happens (in HP 3050, this happens a lot).

2. Canon provided a well designed user interface - functions are easy to follow and operate, including scan / printer / copy.

3. The automatic duplex print is excellent and make the printer worth what you paid for. But when using automatic double sided printing - the print speed turns to be less than a third (instead a half) because the mechanical parts need a lot of time to flip the paper.

4. As some of you may have concerned, the latest firmware (02/09/2009) makes scan function smooth on a Mac - all you need is to press the scan button. This is tested on a Leopard Mac Mini.

5. In case some of you want know the compatibility with printer servers, this printer is full compatible with Netgear PS121 printer server under windows vista (including automatic duplex) x86 and x64. It is NOT compatible with Netgear PS121 under Mac Leopard (no idea why - installation smooth and prints went through - nothing comes out of printer). This printer is NOT compatible with Maxtor Central Axis printer server function.

To summary, this is a good printer for its price. However, concerning its powerful function, you may want spend some extra money for the 4370n to enable every function on network - if you are working in a networked environment.

Review by Punkin:

I am a bit disappointed after I've played with this copier ImageCLASS MF4350d. Note that Canon calls this a copier, not a printer. Thus, when you call Canon or search its site for help/technical support, make sure you select the "Copier" category.

This ImageCLASS MF4350d has been in the market for a while but no one reports this problem: up to this moment of writing this review, the machine cannot scan a document by using its own START button. Everything must be scanned via the software "Toolbox" from the computer.

I bought it a few days ago. I called Canon 1-800 for help but it was useless. Then I went back to the store and tried their demo machine; it has the same problem. Whenever I push the START button on the machine for scanning, there is always a beeping sound as a return but the LCD doesn't show any error - it always indicates "Scanning Mode." So I called Canon again to go over the story. Finally they admitted the problem and said that they are aware of this issue; their engineers are working on the new firmware to fix this. However it won't be soon. The new firmware may be possibly released next month but could be later. I also wrote an email to Canon support to confirm this information one more time, besides their verbal confirmation over the phone.

In addition, the scanning has no detection senor. Thus, the scanned document (scanned from the computer) will go as large as the paper size, which is usually the Letter/A4 size depending on your settings. The scanned document will NOT be resized automatically according to the actual object(s). It is different from its ink jet printers, which usually detect the size of the document or photo and then resize automatically.

If scanning a document directly from the machine's START button is important to you, you should wait to buy until the new firmware comes. If resizing the document or photo automatically is important to you, this copier or printer is not for you; you may consider others or Canon ink jet type printer. After all, this all-in-on laser printer is classified a copier internally by Canon.

Review by Brett J. Marshall:

This is a fantastic product. It was extremely easy to install the software and was up and running in a matter of minutes. I chose this model because it seemed to be a great 'in between' for a home printer that I could also use for my business. It saved me from having to purchase some huge stand alone printer and, of course, saved thousands from purchasing a stand alone unit. This has a high volume printing capability with reasonable toner units available. It has been extremely reliable. I have only used about 3000 pages of printing / copying to date, but have yet to have some type of paper jam. There is also very little delay in printing & copying going from power on to actually printing must be about 15 seconds, if that. There is not some 2 minute 'warm up' process that delays you which is a pleasant surprise. Often, I need something printed quickly and this model is quick.

Review by M. Lapham:

Hopefully I will save someone the trouble that I went through. Although I am big fan of Canon network printers, you should know the scanner funtion of this machine is not capable of being networked. The scanner funtion only works via USB. You can network the printer/copier, but not the scanner function. I needed network availabilit for all three funtions. But it's a great printer/copier.

Review by David:

I bought this about a week ago and have been using it ever since. I have a Mac and finding a multifunction unit that is Mac compatible hasn't been easy. This unit, the MF4370DN, works great with my Mac. The lower models, the MF4350D and the MF4150D are NOT completely Mac compatible.

I couldn't find any reviews for this item - so I will tell you everything I can about it.

I know there is some comparable Brother models out there, but have heard they surge the power in the room. I haven't tested them, but I have a Brother laser printer and it makes all the lights in my home office dim when it gets ready to print. Also that model doesn't duplex print (print/copy on both sides of the page. The MF4370DN does.)

This unit works great with my Mac - it scans, prints, copies, and receives faxes. I originally bought the Canon MF4350d which despite all the information I read is not entirely mac compatible, its scanner is not compatible with Macs, which was confirmed for me by talking with a Canon rep. It would be nice if they mentioned that on their website specs instead of wasting hours of my time and then having to drive 70 miles to return it. (I didn't buy it from Amazon because they didn't have it at the time.)

Canon support told me the MF4370dn is entirely mac compatible - just hit the Scanner button on it twice so it is in "USB SCANNING MODE."

Overall I'm pretty happy with this unit. The print quality is great, the faxing speed and quality is much faster than my old thermal fax. The copier works great. The scan quality off the glass is great. The duplexing feature works great. Unit is very, very quiet - in fact I can't hear it when it's on or sleeping.

Now I can finally get rid of three bulky devices - my fax, laser printer, and scanner, and replace it with this one unit.

Cons:

1) No software comes with this unit that allows you to create a single PDF from the Auto Document Feeder. So if I wanted to scan 10 pages through the feeder and create a single PDF it can't do it. It would create 10 different documents in your scanning program, then you would have to save each one as a PDF and use another program to create a single PDF. After hours of research I discovered Acrobat Professional can create a single PDF directly off the auto document feeder. Acrobat Professional is an expensive program at 9 which is available for Mac. I happen to have it and used it successfully to create a multipage pdf. On Acrobat Professional you go to FILE > CREATE PDF > FROM SCANNER. It worked great. But some kind of software should really be supplied from Canon that can do that. Most people are not going to have Acrobat Professional and certainly won't buy a 0 program just to be able to use a 0 device. I know there is some scanning software that comes with the unit, but it's for Windows (and not sure what it can do.)

2) Auto document feeder also is giving me some trouble - it is scanning letter size pages as legal size. So there is all this white area at the bottom of my scans. Something I will have to talk to Canon about how to fix, if possible.

3) My home phone number doubles as my fax line so I run the telephone line from the wall into the unit -- and then then out to my phone. Whenever I use my phone to make a call - the MF4370DN turns on and starts to blink "Processing Data" and a green light on the side of the unit starts to blink as well. And it stays on for the whole call. Now when I talk on the phone I gotta see this light blinking in my periphery. Kind of annoying and a waste of energy if you ask me.

4)The instructions for using the scanner were not very clear. I installed what I thought was a scanning program on a CD that came with the device. After I installed it I thenspent ages looking for the scanning application which I just installed. Turns out there is no application, instead what you are really installing is the driver. You need to use your own scanning program - I use Photoshop.

5) Every time I want to scan something I need to push the Scan button twice on the device to put it into USB scan mode. It would be nice if it would automatically detect how it was going to transmit. Also you have 1.5 to 2 minutes from when you push SCAN twice to when the machine puts itself to sleep. So a few times now I have tried to scan and couldn't because the SCAN option timed out on the machine.

6) The manual is not Mac friendly. If it was it would have saved me a couple hours figuring out most of the above. I had to call Canon 3 times or so to get the kinks worked out.

But I must say that Canon technical support is bar none the best customer support I have ever experienced. A human will pick up the phone almost immediately and you are speaking to an educated, polite, sympathetic, and a very knowledgeable person who's first language is english and they live here in the good ol' USA. A+ on that Canon.

Despite the problems settings this up - I am happy with my purchase. As I am the first person to review this I am glad to pass on what I learned to help others make an informed choice and if you happen to buy it I hope that I helped save you some time setting it up.

Thanks!

Review by CDiddy:

I bought the printer about 3 weeks ago. It prints well, faxes great, but the scanning is where if falls short.

It came with the canon software for enabling to scan over the network. The box says it scans at 600 x 1200, but that ONLY from the USB connection. The network scanning limits you to only 300dpi. Customer support says I can get the full 600 if i connect the USB port. But the reason I bought it was to use via the network! Sounds like they weren't honest in their product description.

I would recommend another printer such as the comparable brother but I have had a lot of bad experiences with my previous brother products so I will stick with this one despite its shortcoming and hopefully wait for a firmware or software up date that will allow the full scanning resolution via the network.

Review by Piano:

I have no trouble with these cartridges. They last as long (or longer) than the Canon ones, and they are much cheaper! I do a lot of printing, so it is well worth it.

The only thing is they don't fit as easily when you put them in the printer. You have to wiggle carefully.

Review by T. Chu:

Packaging is very good. When I first insert I get error from printer stating not able to detect toner. Re-insert couple of times and same thing happens. After 15 minutes to checking/comparing my original Canon toner and found out that there is a metal pin is not touching the sensor. Once use some force to pile out the metal part so it can touch the sensor, the printer detects the toner. Toner is working good.

Review by Jason Whittington:

This device is basically identical to the MF4370dn which is heavily (and positively) reviewed. As near as I can tell there are three differences between the two units:

1) The D480 is beige, the MF4370 black

2) The D480 has am improved document feeder

3) The D480 has more complete duplexing than the MF4370.

I was actually alerted to #3 by an Amazon review. You can put a stack of two-sided documents into the feeder and produce a set of two-sided duplicates. According to the Amazon reviewer the MF4370 will take two-sided docs in the feeder but can only produce single-sided docs in response.

I haven't tried this with a thick stack of documents but onesie/twosie stuff seems to work great, at least with plain copy paper. I tried duplex-copying a mortgage statement printed on thick paper and the feeder choked on it.

Copying is fast, quiet and sharp. I'm delighted by it, actually. Duplexing is really simple. Manually scanning two different sheets onto one two-sided document or just copying a two-sided document are both very easy. The biggest limitation is the size of the platen. I didn't think I'd even notice this but if you're used to throwing down a book or something of a full-size copy machine you'll feel a bit cramped. If you want to scan oversized stuff you're of out of luck, but that's true of every machine in this price range.

The D480 seems to be a perfectly capable printer and supports full duplexing right from software. I do most of my printing to an HP 3600dn and don't see that changing except for printing music, where duplexing will be really nice to have. Network printing was really easy to set up.

Scanning is where this device falls a bit flat, and that's due almost entirely to the software, not the hardware. Even thought it has a Vista logo on the box it still relies on TWAIN drivers so it doesn't integrate with "Scanners and Cameras" under Vista. The software they ship to scan with is hokey but seems to work. I guess I can hope that Canon will ship updated drivers but I won't hold my breath. I am a little peeved at MSFT for letting Canon put a Vista logo on the box.

Network scanning is a joke on this device (same as with MF4370). The process for doing this is just stupid, and the file transfer is ungodly slow. I was hoping to just pop some docs into the ADF and press a button and have them show up but you can't really do it in the backgrond and the file transfer times are godawful slow. This is partly due to the size of the data but not completely - it's REALLY REALLY SLOW. To give you an idea it took something like a minute or two to transfer an 88KB image. That's KILOBYTES. I think the scanner must send a raw dump over the network which is processed on the host machine. In any case, it's tricky to set up and basically unusable. Note to Canon: "Scan to USB Flash Drive" would be a far better feature.

On the bright side there is support for scanning several pages from the ADF into a single (or multiple) PDFs. There is some sort of OCR software but I haven't tried to use it yet. We hope to scan bills and whatnot and toss the originals - I guess I'll see how well that works out.

I haven't tried the faxing capability. Having a halfway decent ADF will be a godsend for sending contracts or NDAs around, but I'll probably rely more on scanning to PDF than actually faxing. I never receive faxes - I use online services like eFax.

Finally I have to ding the awful documentation. It's really quite bad - I had to call tech support to try to figure out network scanning and found out that even though I didn't want to use USB scanning I still had to do a USB install. Oops. If you want to do anything non-trivial you're going to be experimenting and cursing a bit. Canon's tech support was actually quite good, but better docs would have saved them the cost of the call.

So, as the title says, the hardware is quite good for 0 but the software side is a little lacking. Even though I poo-poo the device a lot I am pretty pleased with it. Based on what I've seen so far I can recommend it for SOHO use if network scanning or tight Vista integration is not going to be a high-priority item for you. I wouldn't recommend using it as a primary departmental printer because the input tray is dinky, but I don't think you'll find a better device under 0.

Review by Mighty Messenger:

My scanner & laser printer wouldn't work with my new Windows Vista 64-bit operating system. I loved my laser printer because the toner seemed to last a very long time compared to my photo printer. So I looked for a laser multifunction. Canon is rated best in most printer reviews. But I also wanted one that was networkable so that I could print from my laptop without having to turn on my desktop computer.

Well, I've had the D480 over 2 months and I really like it. It's like having an office copier, laser printer and scanner next to my desk. (I have not used the fax function so can't report on it.) For all it does, it does not have a large footprint and space is limited for me. It comes alive and copies or prints very quickly. Everything I have printed and scanned has been very clean and professional document quality. The duplex copy, print & scan is a real plus, and I have a bunch of files that I want to scan into electronic format. Paper handling has been perfect. I am very happy with its perforance.

Only problems I had was with documentation. 1)Network Configuration was unclear and incomplete. After repeated efforts, I called Canon support. They were excellent, spoke English, were not in a rush to get me off the line, and knew exactly how to walk be through the network installation. That support is worth a lot these days. By the way, the rest of the documentation was good. 2) Scanning Software is minimalist when scanning on a network configuration and the documentation was unclear. It works but is bare bones. (The unit can be hooked up directly to a PC with a USB cable and the software for that kind of configuration seemed more robust and user friendly.) Maybe I'll purchase a separate software package for scanning.

Bottom Line: I am very happy with this purchase in spite of the documentation and software, especially since I got it for 5 through a Amazon reseller versus the 0 list.