Rob Barron
Loves the place
Registered: September 2006
Location: Poole, Dorset
Posts: 5386
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Review Date: Sat February 3, 2007
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: £70.00
| Rating: 10
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Pros:
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Superb quality, fantastic value
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Cons:
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None that I can find
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I needed a second printer, more for my wife than myself, so she would use it with the laptop and not have to keep connecting to my i9950. I searched around for something that would meet her needs (mostly letters and things) without costing the earth.
I came across the Canon Pixma ip4200 at a stupidly low price and personally paid £53 including VAT and postage which is absolutely STUPID! But in searching around the internet there are a couple of other companies offering this one for about £70 or just under and yet one company is still selling it for £130 so that gives you some idea of the value here.
But what of the quality? Well you figure: it is Canon (therefore not rubbish!) and it has separate ink chambers so doesn't waste ink. Yes, I know, that doesn't tell you about the quality, but....
Show me another printer at anything close to this price that has a droplet size of 1 picolitre! That means each single drop of ink is one billionth of a litre.... you have germs in your body as big as that! Put it another way, if you were to print one single drop on a piece of paper, you would not be able to find it with the naked eye.... it would take several drops side by side before you would see it! With droplets that small, you can be sure this can print as much fine detail as you could ever hope for.
It has a double black cartridge system, one double capacity, which means you can use this for your normal letters and things without getting close to running out of ink. The second black is dye-based which gives greater longevity and a wider gamut of tones so makes photo printing better. It is hard to imagine a CMYK only printer producing good images but let me assure you this one astounded me. Am I saying it is as good at natural tones like fleshtones and nature as my i9950? No, of course I'm not. But then that printer has 8 colours instead of 4 and costs several times the price. But does it produce quality photos? Yes, most certainly. I have used and tested many printers and I can genuinely say this CMYK printer produces better photos than any other printer of its type I have ever seen.
Ok, so reproduction is good, speed is superb, noise is very quiet (unlike Epsons which are slower and much noisier!) what else can this printer do?....
Well there are things on this printer that lift it way outside the normal level of a 'budget' printer (on price, not quality) such as direct printing onto CD/DVD but the one that blows me away is this: You can load two different types of paper at the same time, 150 sheets in the top feed and another 150 in the cartridge feeder which feeds in horizontally. But it isn't just extra capacity that makes it great, you can do two important things: One is you can have two types of paper loaded so you can have photo paper in one and normal paper in another. The other is full duplex printing so you can print front and back without having to manually intervene at all. That is extremely useful and something you just would not expect to get on a printer paying this kind of money.
Ok, so: - great quality pictures
- separate ink tanks
- dye-based black
- double paper-feed
- duplex printing
- excellent build quality
- CD/DVD direct printing
- superbly low price
If you are after a printer but are on a tight budget, you'll struggle to find any other printer at this money that is this good. I simply can't fault it.
Cheers,
Rob
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