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Review: I've just purchased this Canon PIXMA iP1500 colour bubble jet printer, alas not from Amazon, as the print head on my old Epson died half way through an urgent print job, and I had to get a new printer ASAP. For the price, it's a very high quality printer. It's neat and compact, and despite being a dreary grey colour, is quite attractive to look at. More important though, is its functionality, which I cannot fault. Text, even on draft setting, is crisp and clear, with no banding or smudging. However, the real bonus is its ability to print high resolution digital images, at a quality indistinguishable from those purchased at any photo-printing outlet, especially if you use good quality photo paper. The printer comes with a five sheet sample of Canon photo paper. The colours were fantastic and very life-like, and again there was no smudging, banding or distortion. With this kind of quality, there's no real need to fork out an extra £40 or more on a photo-printer. It's also a very fast machine - it takes less than a minute to do a 6x4 inch, high quality photo, whereas my old Epson would take about five minutes. It promises eighteen pages per minute when printing black text - although I didn't time it, it seems to be even faster than this. There's also some excellent software provided with the printer. The photo printing software is so simple to use that a child could use it. I've had perfect results each time, something I never had with my old printer. It takes away all the trial and error of trying to tweak the print settings to ensure good results - it does it all for you with a few clicks of the mouse. The actual installation process is really simple, too. Once the CD boots up, it installs the software in no time, with the minimum of input from the user. The only quibble I have here is that if you install all the supplied software, it does take up a lot of disk space. Having said that, there is an option for custom install, so if you decide you don't need some of the photo printing software, you can leave it out, saving a bit of space on your hard drive. There are a couple of negatives associated with the product, although these aren't enough to make me award it any less than five stars. Firstly, there's no USB cable with it - no problem if, like myself, you decide to buy it as a replacement printer, as you'll probably be able to use the cable from your old printer. The only real disappointment for me is that the printer has no tray to catch documents as they're printed. This means you cannot really place it near the edge of a desk, as it will spit your printed works onto the floor, unless you're prepared to catch every sheet as it comes out. And believe me, when I say spit, I mean it, as it ejects the paper quite fast. However, despite the niggles about the lack of paper tray and USB cable, I'd still recommend this as a fantastic little printer, and wholeheartedly recommend it. |
Computer Hardware
