I’ve taken the plunge and finally made a long-thought-about move from Epson to Canon for my home printing needs.  Previous posts here have journalled the hi-jinks I’ve had trying to get consistant results from the several Epson printers I’ve owned.  I’ve always bought Epson printers up until now.  I suppose it was a case of ‘better the devil you know’. 

Tonight, I reversed this trend and bought a Canon Pixma ip4500.  It seems, so far, as if this is a good decision.

Basically, my good old Stylus Photo 1290 recently packed up and left for a better place (in other words started printing random blue lines on my prints – same thing really).  I’d always had a lot of trouble with both the 1290, and the Stylus photo 895 I had before it.  The big problem was print head clogging.  I would use up half of the ink per cartridge getting the print heads unblocked every time I wanted to print.  Usually, by the time I managed to get a gap-free nozzle check page, I’d have used half the cartridge in ink, and lost the will to live.  I went over to a continuous ink system (fotospeed) which helped somewhat on the 1290, but when that packed up, it was no use on the 895. After reading lots and lots of bad reviews of the current crop of Epson A4 printers, I decided I couldn’t be arsed with blockages any more and gave up for a bit.  However, recently, I’ve wanted to get back into home printing (at least up to A4 – I’ll keep bigger for the professionals at Photobox or somewhere similar!).  I read up, and decided to go for a Canon instead.  After a bit of research, I settled on the Pixma ip4500.  It has better economy and print speed than its newer sibling (the ip4600), and all reviews say to go for this one if you have a choice between the two.  So I did.  

Results?  Well – preliminary messing about seems to show that this is a damn good printer.  I’m using the bundled colour profiles with the Fotospeed paper I’m currently using, and seem to be getting good results. There are very slight casts (mainly very slight magenta), but nothing that can’t be corrected.  The speed is great – much faster than anything I’ve had in the past.  Also, I’ve done a good 5 or 6 A4 pages of test prints, and the ink level hasn’t even been touched.  I could NEVER have done that with the Epsons.  The photo quality is excellent, and to be honest, the ease of setting the thing up, and the fact I’m now a little less fussy about my prints has probably helped.  

This thing also prints on CDs and DVDs – not sure I’ll ever use it, but it’s nice to have.  

Will report back when I’ve produced some more output…!