First of all jhansman, you put your finger on a printer that did exist, so that animal still exists. And as also another owner of a ip4000, I hope mine never dies. Some 10,000 pages and still going.
But you are also correct, the new chips have killed that inkjet golden goose, but with a few codicils. (1) Because you have a non-chipped Canon, you can buy very cheap third party cartridges, and your ip4000 can't tell the difference between a generic or OEM cartridge. So you can use them interchangeably. But the next and the next generation of chipped Canons can tell the difference, and without a chip, the generic cartridge will not print in a chipped Canon. Nor is it any different for a chipped HP or whatever. (2) But if you are willing to refill your own ink, the picture somewhat changes. The fact is and remains, that its illegal under US law to prevent refilling a depleted OEM cartridge. But the evil empire still strikes back, you must void your warranty in a convoluted process while losing ink level monitoring. But the lone bit of good news with Canon chip generation one, seen in the Canons that use the PGI-5&8 cartridges, is that after some 5 years, is that those chips are now cracked. So for an investment of $30.00 or so, you can buy a chip resetter, and fill your chipped cartridges as cheaply as the BCI-3&6 cartridges while retaining ink level monitoring. And you can also buy pre-filled generic cartridges with a new chip fairly cheaply. (3) But as soon as the generation one chip was
cracked, the evil empire again struck back, and now all new Canon inkjet printers feature a new yet to be cracked chip in the PGI-220&221 chipped cartridge family. (4) The point being, there are many used Canon printers to be had on the used ebay market, some all in ones, and some simply printers like your ip4000, and others all in ones that will print, copy, scan, and in some models fax also. Just don't be a fool and buy a new Canon with uncracked chips.
And the other thing to say when you mumble something about an all in one printer, is that in that all in one class, the monochrome laser dominates that class in terms of reliability. Which is why I bought a used brother monochrome all in one laser to add to my network. It will print, copy, color scan, and G3 fax. And because its networked with my wife's ip4000, both my wife and I can print to either printer. I can print to the Canon way cheaper, but the laser is way faster.
It will be a sad day if my ip4000 ever craps out, but most likely failure mode will be a replaceable $60.00 printhead, but paper feed wise, I expect to get 40,000 pages plus.
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