Reccomendations for a printer

Re: Reccomendations for a printer

Lasers are great for low-cost per-print use, and for general office-type graphics. I hadn't thought they were suitable for photographic type work. What sort of quality do you need for your color graphic and photo prints?

For an all-purpose inkjet printer, I recommend the Canon Pixma MP600. I bought one recently and I'm really impressed with it as a whole. The main features, photo and general purpose printing are fast and produce good quality. All the reviews state the MP600 produce good quality photos, though not quite as good as the same-class Epsons. But for me, they're very good. Text and general graphics look very sharp; reviews generally place it well above Epsons for this. It has a scanner, and can serve as both a computer-scanner and single-unit photocopier. This functionality is easy to use and works fine for business-type scans. I've not yet tested it for comparison against my wife's dedicated scanner.

But it's also a well-designed unit, with various secondary features that come together to create a printer that makes my life easier. The rear paper feeder, front paper catch, and LCD control screen all fold up, so the printer can be left on but protected against dust drifting inside it. But it also has a second cassette paper tray underneath; print to it using the paper tray and the paper catch kicks open automatically. When I'm done, I close it up again.

The print controls and large LCD screen make it the best <$200 printer to work with for manual operations, like photocopies, that I saw when shopping.

And finally, when closed up, it has a flat top, so I can pile things on top of it, without impeding its performance. And since there's never enough desk space, this turns out to be a positive feature as well.

It's commonly on sale for $150.

Re: Reccomendations for a printer

Both Epsons and Canons have the ink-monitoring software, to my knowledge. But on both my Mac and Windows machine the Canon doesn't have any un-removable software that I've noticed.

If you want top-quality photo printing for your money, Epson seems the way to go right now. The Epson Rx580 is very nice and on sale close to $100 sometimes.

If you want an all-around printer/scanner/copier, I'm convinced the Canon MP600 can't be beat.

If you really need a workhorse, and cheap per-page text printing, laser is the winner. But I don't know if that's a good solution if you want to print high-quality artwork.