Excellent Printer, Inkjet technology has come a long way!

We were recently in the market for a new printer after several years of a black & white HP laser printer that had terrible feeding problems. Prior to the laser, I had had an early Canon bubblejet printer. I hadn't been too impressed with that inkjet, too much nozzle plugging and general ink problems.

Choosing a Printer

An HP 1510 All-in-One caught my eye at Costco and got me thinking about how nice it would be to have a good printer again. It appeared to be quite a bargain @ $70 and it looked very nice. My previous HP had been an All-in-One so that really appealed to me. Not one to buy on impulse and knowing that the printer is cheap, it's the ink that bleeds you dry, I decided to do a little research before making a purchase.

At first, the HP seemed to be a great choice, the Epinions reviews were pretty good and the ink cartridges were relatively cheap. Then I found a bunch of bad reviews on another site, many of them mentioned feeding problems and some felt it used an awful lot of ink cartridges. One particularly good review went into depth on ink costs. It seems that the HP's cartridges were inexpensive because they had almost no ink in them, 5ml per cartridge. I certainly didn't want another HP with feeding problems and wasn't too pleased with the tiny ink cartridges either.

Armed with all this new information, I went out to the office supply stores to see what else was available That's when I first saw the Canon Pixma MP450. It's really quite striking with it's glossy navy blue finish and silver metallic trim. I looked at a few others but nothing really compared with the Canon. It's funny that I hadn't even considered a Canon printer up until this point, especially since I'd owned one previously and I also have a Canon camera. The next step was to check out the Canon's ink costs. It was very reasonable especially considering how much ink was in each cartridge, 16ml for the standard cartridge and 22ml for the high yield cartridge. The standard 3-color cartridge holds 3ml of each color and the high yield has 7ml of each color. Incidentally, at regular prices the standard black cartridge (PG-40) and the high yield color cartridge (CL-51) offer the best value per ml of ink.

The MP450 is regularly priced @ $150 but on this particular weekend at OfficeMax it was on sale for $130 with an additional $30 rebate. So at $100 for such a great printer it was almost a no-brainer. Like I said before, I'm not an impulse buyer so I went to all the other office supply stores to compare prices, then I went home to read reviews on the MP450. There weren't many reviews on Epinions but on some other sites I found many glowing reviews. Satisfied that this was the printer for us, I went back to OfficeMax and bought the Canon MP450.

Setup & Software

Once I got all the protective film and tape off, the setup was fairly straightforward. There is a quick-start guide that quickly shows how to install the included high yield ink cartridges, attach the printer and load the drivers. Unfortunately, the printer does not include a USB cable, so you'll have to purchase that separately, unless you already have one.

Some reviews complained about the size of the driver programs and they are large at around 700mb but you can pick & choose what you want to install. About 130mb of that is a photo editing program that you may not need and there are several other applications that I didn't install. I think I ended up with about 450mb total, which is none too small but hardly disconcerting with the size of the average hard drive these days.

Operation

The MP450 can be used with or without a computer. As a standalone unit it's a color or black & white copier and a photo printer with built-in memory card reader. It has slots for CompactFlash, MemoryStick, SD/MMC and SmartMedia cards. You'll have to get an adapter to read XD cards. When you insert a memory card from your camera, you can view and edit your photos on the 1.9" color LCD built-in to the control panel. When you connect it to a computer it becomes a printer and very capable scanner. It can also be connected to any Pictbridge compatible camera for printing directly from the camera.

Copying

Copying is very straightforward and easy. It's not very speedy but it does a very nice job. It has separate buttons for color or black & white copies so you can choose easily without navigating any menus. You can easily adjust many settings such as copy darkness, enlargement & reduction, and the number of copies right on the LCD display with the four-way control pad. Enlargement & reduction range from 25% to 400% of the original size.

Photo Printing

The MP450 is a very capable photo printer. You can print borderless prints up to 8x10. Included with the printer is a sample package of (5)pre-cut 4x6 sheets of Canon photo paper. I wasn't terribly interested in printing photos because I usually just upload my photos to the Costco photolab and get "real" prints for much cheaper than I could print them myself. I was curious though just how good these inkjet prints were getting these days so I tried out one of the sample sheets. I uploaded the same photo to the Costco photolab for comparison purposes. I have to say, I was quite impressed with the results. Side by side, it wasn't easy to tell which was which. The Canon print had a somewhat warmer tone that wasn't entirely accurate but probably wouldn't have been noticeable without the Costco print for comparison. If it wasn't for the expense, I would have no problem using this printer for my own prints, it was very impressive. Canon offers an extensive array of photo papers, pre-cut & full sheets, glossy to matte for all your photo needs.

Printing

Considering that this is indeed a computer printer, I should probably say a little about it's performance in that regard. It easily produces some of the finest color or black & white printing that I've ever seen. It can print on 17-28# paper up to legal size, envelopes, transparencies, etc. I have printed beautiful color business cards as well, it's unbelievably capable. It prints in black & white @ 22ppm and color @ 17ppm so it's quite fast as well.

Scanning

Don't forget, it's also a 1200x2400dpi color scanner. The included scanning software really shines here. It's very easy to adjust the settings for your scanning needs, color or black & white, high or low resolution. You can save your scanned images and documents as JPEGS or PDF files for maximum versatility.

Miscellaneous

You can also use the MP450 as a card reader to download images from a memory card to your computer. Besides a USB 2.0 connection, it also supports infrared data transfer and with an optional attachment, is capable of BlueTooth wireless communication. I haven't tried either of these so I can't speak to it's performance in this area.

Conclusion

As I'm sure you can tell, I couldn't be much happier with this purchase, after almost a month of usage. As noted in the negatives, the glossy finish does show dust, which can be annoying. The LCD display may be a little small for some users, especially if you're using it to view or edit photos very often. The single paper tray isn't much of a problem unless you frequently use two different sizes or types of paper. I only mention it because the MP450's big brother, the MP500, does offer two paper trays. It also has a 2.5" LCD display so it addresses a couple of the MP450's shortcomings. It sells for $200 though and I don't think it looks as nice as the MP450 so I'm happy with the tradeoffs.