Great entry-level photo and general-purpose printer

I received one of these printers for "free" (i.e., purchase price refunded when you apply for the rebates) when I bought a new iMac. I was so impressed with it that I decided to pick up a second one "free" with the purchase of a new digital camera at Staples. That way, I have spare parts (or an entire spare printer) if anything breaks.

This printer is fairly large (12"x17"x6") even when totally closed up, and needs enough height to feed paper from the top at the back for heavy papers. So expect to leave quite a bit of room in front and above the printer to allow it to work.

The printer is a very simple printer, requiring your computer to do most of the work with making the prints look good. Windows XP offers a variety of print formats for folders of pictures, so you can print 3 4"x6" prints or 2 5"x7" prints or 1 8"x10" print on a page. These all look beautiful when printed on photo paper. I haven't tried printing from the Mac yet, but I'm confident the prints will look just as good from there.

If you have a PictBridge-compatible camera (both my new one and my 4 year-old digital camera are PictBridge compatible), you can print directly from the camera without needing a computer. My new camera allows me to select from a variety of paper sizes, but seems to always print one picture per page. Again, the smarts come from the camera, so if the camera has a good driver, you'll get better results.

Setup was simple: 1. Install the print head (should be a one-time thing), 2. Install the ink cartridges (one per color - yellow, cyan, magenta, and black), 3. load the software onto your PC, 4. attach the USB printer cable (not included), and 5. start printing.

You need to be sure you match the printer settings to the quality of the paper you're using in order to get best results. On plain (copier) paper, the results were pretty dismal for photos. This type of printout would be fine for reports for school, though, and it prints out to copier paper very quickly (several pages per minute). Printing photos is a much slower process (figure nearly a minute each, even for 4x6 photos), but for a moderate quantity of pictures, it's not unbearably slow. And it sure beats having to hit the one-hour photo lab.

Note that if you have a perfectionist streak about your photos (such that you probably wouldn't visit just any one-hour photo lab), you might not be entirely happy with a four-color print job either. But for printing snapshots quickly and easily, this printer seems wonderful.

Supplies costs:
yellow, cyan, and magenta cartridges -- $13-$14
black cartridges -- closer to $15

Because each ink comes in its own cartridge, you only replace the ink when the cartridge runs dry. No reason to replace your cyan cartridge if your yellow runs out...

I haven't yet been able to get an idea of how many photos I'll get off of a set of cartridges, as I haven't had the printer for that long.

The cartridges have sensors on them to detect ink levels. If you want to buy an aftermarket cartridge from someone other than Canon, they'll make you transfer the sensors to the new cartridge, then accept a bunch of scary-sounding warnings about running out of ink. While I doubt this will be a big deal, if I don't have to replace ink too often, I'll settle for buying the original Canon inks.

I think the photos from this printer are good enough to give away in albums, and for Christmas this year, I'm planning on bringing both digital cameras, the notebook computer, this printer, and a lot of photo paper. Then I'll try to get all of the nieces and nephews together for some nice photos. That way, I can send everyone home with a full set of family photos to make an album. I think everyone will be delighted by this idea.