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Inkjet printers are great but I hate their outrageous prices for cartridges. A gallon of milk $4. A gallon of printer ink $8000! The last straw was when my Canon multifunction inkjet printer refused to even scan to my laptop till I replaced the cartridge! Talk about greed. Why does a scan operation require a cartridge? And the worst part was the cartridge was not even empty, the printer was 2 months old, must’ve taken 10 or 15 printouts.

I decided to switch to a laser printer. Here’s what I was looking for:

• Must work with a Mac
• Duplex printing (means it can print on both sides of the paper)
• Must be able to scan and copy
• Laser, mono
• Network printing capability (wired or wireless)
• Must be affordable

Tall order! Though there were a number of all-in-one printers, most of them did not work with a Mac. Some of the earlier ImageClass series don’t work with the Mac, but the MF4370dn is officially supported by Canon.

What’s in the box

• Comes with a starter cartridge
• No USB or Network cable
• Does come with a Fax cable
• The printer
• Manuals and Drivers for the PC (A flyer advices Mac users to download the latest drivers from Canon site)

First Impresions

Amazon shipped the printer pretty quickly. The printer looks nice, not ugly not as sleek as the Samsung SCX-4500 but better than a Brother! Setting up the hardware took about 20 minutes unlike inkjet printers. The printer is quite compact for a laser printer, but if you are moving from an inkjet to a laser, it looks big!

Printing
Unlike Canon’s inkjet series printers which would work right out of the box on a Mac even without downloading drivers, the MF4370 requires you to install drivers before you can use it on a Mac. Once the software is installed and configured, my Mac had no trouble finding the networked printer via Bonjour.
The printouts are very crisp, there were no paper jams and the printer is relatively quiet and fast.

Scanning
Scanning leaves a lot to be desired atleast on the Mac. The driver installation is counter-intuitive. I’ll write a separate howto on how to setup the MF4370 for Scanning without a call to Canon’s support! If you are looking for network scanning, this is not it. Scanning is supported only via the USB cable.
The scan quality was decent. I don’t do a lot of scanning, so no network scanning wasn’t a big deal. It scans in color too.

Fax
Sorry, I don’t have a need for Fax, so I have no idea.

Copying
Quick, decent quality

Energy
Consumes just 3W of energy. Wakes up from sleep very quickly and doesn’t dim the lights when it prints (Brother users would like to know!).
Consumables
At 2000 sheets per toner, it isn’t as cheap as a Brother cartridge, but not as expensive as an Inkjet printer.

Summary
Pros:

• Works on a Mac
• Looks compact
• Decent pricing
• Supports Double sided printing
• No paper jams
• Supports both USB and network printing
• Copying without the need for a PC/Mac

Cons

• No USB or Network cable
• Scanning software needs to be improved on a Mac
• Network scan support not available on a Mac
• Toners should be able to print as many pages as a Brother
• Starter cartridge provided with the printer (less capacity than a normal toner)

In my opinion, I like this printer as a Mac user. If Canon can fix the scanning software, this would be the perfect printer for the Mac user!