You might be able to get this printer for free. Canon frequently runs rebates on their photography equipment, and these rebates sometimes include other Canon products, such as this printer.

For example, their current rebate (expires January 15th, 2006) includes this printer, plus it is also set up with the interesting feature in that the more stuff you buy, the higher each item's individual rebate is (buy 2 items, get 2x the rebate on each, etc).

I was buying two other Canon photo items, and because of this rebate, adding the printer as a third item increased my rebates on the first two by $150. Plus the rebate itself on the printer, and Canon literally paid me $25 to take this printer off their hands.

Setup:

First, the printer's packaging is straightforward to unpack. It seems a bit heavy for its size (not that I care, once its installed), and its overall size is roughly what I'd expect a generic letter-sized format inkjet printer to be...nothing really to note here.

But in setting it up, I found two things of note in my particular office setup:

First, the printer has two feed trays: a toploader in the back, and a bottom tray. The design of the bottom try is that it forms part of the bottom of the printer case. If you have a big, empty table to set up on this isn't a problem, but for many of us, our computer tables are already too crowded, so its not too uncommon to be tight on space. As such, a pretty common cheat is to let a peripheral stick an inch off the lip of a table or shelf. But if you try to do that with this printer, it will be resting on the bottom feed tray, which means that you'll be unable to easily pull out this bottom paper tray to add paper. If you're tight on space and need to cantilever the printer even slightly, you'll need to stick a board under it first to keep all the legs supported.

The second item I found during an initial test print: when this printer is printing, it really throws around some significant internal mass, which makes the entire assembly jerk roughly around. The printer is probably prone to walking itself off of some surfaces, plus it will tap against anything placed adjacent to it.

Setup bottom line:

This is a printer that is unforgiving of not having its own dedicated flat space with some elbow room to operate from: it is intolerant of any cutting of corners. Plan to have a 1 inch clearance on all sides.

Ink:

Inside, there's a row of six (6) inkjet cartridges; the printer includes a set to get you started. I wasn't familiar with Canon's ink cartridge style or installation procedure, but after I did 2 or 3, its pretty easy.

The cartridges themselves are pretty slender, so they obviously can't hold all that much ink. I've already checked prices and they cost $12-$15 each to replace, so a full replacement set of supplies will set you back a disappointingly high $75, which is ~30% of the original cost of the printer...hence why the rebate? Like men's razors and many other printers, the manufacturer intends that it will be in its replenishment supplies where they'll make money.

At this point, my thoughts were that the resulting photo-grade prints had darn better be worth it! I'd also recommend having a second plain black+white inkjet to be your workhorse printer for mundane printing (lower cost per page for ink).

Printing from applications (Mac OS):

Overall, the controls are good and have the appropriate controls for paper type (size, plain, glossy, etc), but...

"Argh!" The paper feed tray selection isn't actually controlled by the computer's printer setup dialogs. The paper tray is effectively "hardware controlled" through a push button on the printer: I have to get up out of my chair, turn around to the table where I have my printer, confirm the paper selection setting, then sit down and hit Print. Its a nuisance when you're only making one-off prints.

Printing from cameras, PDA's, etc:

I'm not really interested in these features, but I did try using the IR communication port with my Palm PDA to make a print - - it worked on the very first try.

I've also gone into the included configuration software and enabled the option to allow the printer's Flash Memory Card port to show up on the computer as another USB device. This also worked correctly on the first try.

Some of the controls for these types of devices are accessed through the LCD color display and the buttons on the printer itself. The printer is clearly intended to be able to be used as a stand-alone for Mom who has a new digital camera, but no PC. Overall, I think that its complexity and sometimes non-intuitive menus would probably intimidate my Mom for awhile, even though she's fairly PC literate.

Print Quality
The printer includes an envelope of a half dozen sheets of 4x6" glossy printing paper, which encourages you to try printing a couple of your snapshots.

I was quite favorably impressed with the results...looks as good as a standard print from my local camera store.

NOTE: paper in the bottom feed tray needs to be installed as "Finish Side Down"

Conclusions

For a "free" printer, I'm very satisfied with the results; I expect to print a lot of hard copy prints of digital photo images that have been accumulating, both in 4x6 and 8x10, even though I know that this will set me back a few dimes in printer supplies (ink and paper). At present, I consider that the price to pay for the convenience of doing it all at home, but I might change my mind depending on how quickly it runs through ink. Overall, my general observation here is that if the ink is expensive, the original price of the printer shouldn't be.

-hh

Recommended:
No

Amount Paid (US$): 1
Operating System: Macintosh