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Canon Pixma iP1500: High resolution at a low cost
Date of Review: Oct 18, 2005
The Bottom Line: The bottom line is watching you...
This is a recent addition to my home office that I picked up as an insurance replacement for an old Canon BJC-4000 that was damaged in our basement flood. I had intended to use it for greetings cards and light color print tasks but after printing a full page photo with it, I was inclined to use it as my default color printer. The printer is a little slower than my
Lexmark Z715 but has a much clearer print and brighter color at the same high resolution.
Canon Pixma iP1500 This is an inkjet printer with high resolution and decent speed. The main attraction of this printer is the price tag. You can find the iP1500 for $49.99 or less and the cost of ink is minimal. I found the Canon BCI-24 black cartridges for $6.95 and color cartridges for $16.95 on inkquik.com but I also found third party cartridges at $2.95 for both black and tri-color on the same site. The amount of money you spend compared to the quality of the print is incredible in this day and age where it is usually cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy new printer cartridges.
Features * Edge-to-edge true borderless photos (4 x 6, 5 x 7, & 8.5 x 11 in.)
* 1,088 nozzles
* Compact, space saving design
* Microscopic droplets as small as 2 picoliters
* Maximum 4800 x 1200 color dpi
* Borderless 4" x 6" photographs in approx. 58 seconds
* USB 2.0 connectivity (USB 1.1 compatible)
* 13ppm in full color printing (at lowest resolution)
* 18ppm in black printing
The printer has incredibly crisp photo printing and excellent text. The secret behind the quality is found in the Full-photolithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering (FINE). It uses a unique 1,088-nozzle print head that produces precise ink droplets consistently as small as 2 picoliters (that is microscopic). This new technology produces very fine resolution and clear, highly detailed images. Using more nozzles with higher accuracy shows better images and finer text. Further enhancing the printing quality, this low cost printer uses a pigment-based black ink for near laser quality text, along with high intensity color inks for vivid photos and color graphics.
Installation Installation takes about 10 minutes and is easy enough for a child of six to install on his own (adults may need to refer to the documentation first). You simply insert the CD and follow the directions. The installation program will tell you when to plug in the USB cable and power on the printer. The printer is automatically detected by WIndows and is actually installed before the isntallation program finishes installing the accompanying software. I found no need to align print heads but you can print a test page to check the alignment if you like.
Software The software that comes with the printer is easy to use and has many options for printing. The print driver lets you control the quality of the print job for speed or high resolution and what kind of paper you are printing on. It also gives you the option of printing borderless which eliminates all but a very slim area around the page where the printer does not print. This is nice for printing 8.5"x11" photo portraits.
Additional programs installed are:
* Easy Photo Print: a utility for printing pictures quick from an image gallery.
* Canon Photo Record: a program for creating photo albums and managing photos
* Canon photo application guide
* Canon users guide
The software package is complete but not exactly professional software. It is plenty good enough for most home users and does it's job very well. I personally use Adobe Photoshop for all my photo editing but having the image gallery is nice so I don't have to search my endless folders for the pictures I want to use or print.
Personal Use I have come to love this little printer and I use for almost all my photo tasks now except the few times when I need to use my color laser for waterproof permanent images. I still use the Lexmark Z715 on occasion but not as much as I used to. This little printer saves me a lot of money on ink and does a better job on photos than the Lexmark. I am happy with the printer and very pleased with the quality of the print jobs.
The printer does make a loud grinding noise when loading paper but it is only for a second, then it is quiet after that. This little detraction is nothing compared to the benefits the printer offers.
Conclusion This is a fine color printer for home or office use. It performs better than other printers in its class that cost more and have more expensive ink replacements. The high resolution capability combined with low initial cost and low maintenance cost make this a very affordable and very useful printer. I recommend it to anyone who needs a good high quality color printer and doesn't want to spend a fortune in ink cartridges.
Thanks for reading,
Gr8ful :-)
