A Review Of The Canon ImageCLASS MF4370dn Laser All-in-One Printer For The Mac
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!
Incoming search terms:
- Canon MF4370DN review
- mf4370dn review
- canon mf4370
- mf4370dn network scanning
- i hate canon printer
- i want to buy CANON IMAGECLASS MF both side printable aLL IN ONE LASER PRINTER payment after post
- image class mf4370dn wireless connection
- how turn on 2 sided printing on Canon MF4370DN
- imageclass scanner mac
- how to think is the cartridge is empty in canon mf8000
17 Comments
Hi there,
Great review.
I bought this printer after reading this review, and I also am a Mac user.
I connected my printer using USB.
However, I am not able to duplex print for some reason.
My “Two-sided” option is selected as off and I cannot seem to change it.
Could you please tell me how to do this?
My driver is up to date.
Many thanks.
Hoon,
Open a document in Preview
Press print
The pring dialog opens
There will be a combo box called preview, change that to finishing
In that select print style as 2 sided printing from default 1 sided
Hope this helps!
Thank you so much for such a speedy response!
I have just printed out a document on 2 sides automatically.
Thank you once again.
I hope you don’t mind if I post another question in the future.
@Hoon. Glad it worked out!
I have the same unit on a Mac network but if you do not print for some time (usually overnight) any print sent to the printer fails with a message printer not on network. If I cycle the power on the printer and restart the queue and print job it will print. USB printing is fine. Are you having any issues of this type? I have installed the latest firmware.
Mark, hate to say, I have the same issue. The printer loses connection to the router after a while and requires a restart to acquire an ip address. Good hardware, but Canon needs to improve its software.
I’m guessing when it goes into energy saver mode, it loses connection.
Thanks for help with duplex printing. that worked.
The network printing problem is apparently unfixable at this time, Canon has sent me a different MF4370DN (I can’t call it a new one because it had over 16000 copies on it according to the counter — I feel a bit cheated because the one that I sent back had 35). The replacement took 5 weeks to arrive, didn’t have the latest firmware and has the same problem. My dialog with Canon is ongoing and I think that they have no real answer for this problem.
Don’t worry you are not missing much.. The network scanning on the machine is so slow anyway you would never use it. Thats on a PC too.
How did u get the scanning to work. I downloaded and installed the latest “scanner driver” from the Canon website but I can’t figure out how to make it work. HELP!
Are you using windows or mac?
Thank you so much for the advice! I was ripping my hair out trying to figure out how to duplex print.
You are welcome!
Hi–
Wanted to see how you got Network scanning working.
Have this hooked up to my MBP running OS X and Vista on my Dell.
Hello Mark — I’m having trouble finding the printer driver for MAC for the canon imageclass mf4370dn. Can you please send it to me? I don’t need to scan now… that’ll be for another day
Try this location for the latest driver. You will have to select your OS X version to see the drivers.
http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/support/consumer/printers_multifunction/imageclass_series/imageclass_mf4370dn#DriversAndSoftware
Mark
I no longer have the printer because I could not make it stay on the network for more than a day and Canon’s service was rude and unhelpful. I replaced it with a Brother printer that “just works”.
I have been using the device via USB but want to use it for network printing, i uninstalled everything rebooted (PC) and dl’d the current drivers from the canon site. during instal when searching for printers device name is “unknown device” the Mac ID is right w/no IP. If I hit next it prompts for IP which I enter (got from the printer through the menu) and it says “the selected device is already set with an IP and then back to the select device. I try search by IP says device of the specified IP is not found. Any suggestions?