My reviews of products are my findings, I don't gloss over crap aspects of a device, nor allow a good aspect of something to excuse the bad aspects. If you produce a badly designed product, you get castigated for it. Don't like that? Do a better job with your products!
I really dislike inkjet printers for the usual reasons (expensive ink, wastefully handled by the printer, ink clogs, printouts that smudge with any moisture, etc), and this printer is no exception. And many years after swearing off inkjet printers, using laser printers instead, I bought this one (a long time ago) for one reason only: Because it could print onto CD-R and DVD-R discs (there's a tray that holds them in position).
I worked in video production, and it looks much neater to give someone a disc with a printed title than scrawling on it in texta (which is said to eventually ruin some discs, as the chemicals work through the substrate, not that I've noticed that with a couple of decades of doing so, even if the look of the text has gone a bit bad). And it's much more organised to have labelled discs than unlabelled discs and just hope that they don't get seperated from their boxes.
On that front, printing disc labels, it was pretty good. Once you'd figured out how to do it, it did it fairly well. The trouble was, you had Windows software to deal with if you wanted to directly print from some application to the disc, and the supplied software was just diabolical. Without that special software, trying to print to a disc instead of paper, was next to impossible, it just wasn't a selectable option. The only viable method, which I always went with, was to create a square JPEG file with a graphics program, putting your desired printout into the regions that could be printed, save that file to a SD card, insert that card into the printer, and go through its menus to print a file to a disc.
I never used an older technique of labelling discs, where you printed onto an adhesive label than applied that to a disc. They were fraught with problems (it's risky putting sticky labels through printers, it's tricky properly applying sticky labels to discs, badly applied ones upset how a disc spins in a player, and they always looked terrible).
To easily plot out what was the printable area I scanned a disc on the printer's flatbed scanner, imported the image into my graphics program, and used it as a background behind the artwork, then hid that layer when it came to exporting the JPEG. No measuring is needed, you can simply see where to work.
But on the general problems I have with inkjet printers, this printer is no exception. The ink refills contain a small amount of ink, they're stupidly expensive for what they are, and most of that ink is wasted rather than printed. It dries out between uses, it goes through extensive and lengthy cleaning routines that waste a lot of ink before it will start printing (even if the heads weren't clogged). Considering the long time periods it had between printing uses, for me, I'll go as far as saying that 90% of the ink is wasted rather than used. Yes, that bad. I put in new tanks, did barely any printing, they were still very full when I finished the job. And the next time (after quite some delay) that I had more discs to print to, most of the ink is gone.
Worse still, it'd go through those lengthy cleaning routines even if I wasn't going to print, such as scanning some document straight to a JPEG file. Not only wasting my money, but also my time, as it refused to scan until it'd finished going through that crap.
It's also another of those printers that uses the colour ink even when printing pure black text. Even though it has an ink tank especially for black text (it has a large page black ink cartridge, plus smaller imagery black, grey, yellow, cyan & magenta ink tanks). Black text looks awful without it being able to combine inks, and it throws hissy fits about insufficient ink.
Some people buy these (and similar) printers for printing photos at home. But considering the cost of special photo paper, and the inks, I cannot see this being economical. It's cheaper to go to a photo lab, or a do-it-yourself photo booth in nearby shops. And you'd get your prints made on proper photographic paper with a long lifespan.
These days, I only use it as a flatbed scanner. It's reasonable, but unremarkable. And since I mostly use it with Linux, occasionally with a Mac, I only have the most basic of scanning features available to use, since Canon only released a stupidly low-tech Linux application for it, completely unsupported, and there's not enough information about it for someone else to produce an open-source one, instead.
You're supposed to be able to do various scanning and printing features directly on the printer, via it's LCD screen. But it's still dependent on being networked to a Windows computer with their drivers installed if you want to do something like scan and save an image to a file (it won't do it to its internal SD card slot).
It can be connected via USB, or networked using ethernet or WiFi. That's ethernet or WiFi, not both, so a pain for mixed networks. Desktop computers rarely have WiFi hardware, and portable devices are rarely connected via ethernet cables. Since I only used it with desktop PCs, mine's networked via ethernet.
And that's where I struck another damn stupid problem. On the Mac, it could use the printer via the network, but could only use the scanner over USB. This is a shortcoming of Canon's software, not the MacOS.