I have been using computers for a fair few years now but I have never owned a printer, so I thought it was about time I got one.
I have a lot of photo's that I have taken with my digi camera over the last year or so that I would like to print out, so the printer would have to be quite good for photos and the odd bit of text work.
I have no idea what to start looking for in a printer so I was hopping that a few of you would make some suggestions.
Cheers.


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Someone was asking about a printer and scanner, check my comments there. Basically Canon i550 is untouchable. Speed, quietness, quality (text, colour, photo on plain, photo on photo), running costs etc. Not that I trust TomsHW fully but take a look there as they did a roundup.




Epson are reknowned for wasting loads of ink each time you power the printer on and any time a clean cycle is run. They are also notorious for reporting ink tanks as empty VERY prematurely and making it very hard for you to replace them when the printer isn't prompting you. Other downsides are a noisy feeding mechanism, disgustingly poor fast mode and finally the text quality is pretty poor when compared to Canon or HP.
HP are very good, it took them a long time to catch up. Throwing away the print heads with each empty cart makes the carts very expensive, they also use quite a nasty method of offering better photo quality by using a cludged black+light_colour tank in combination with the normal colours. Nice result but simply not worth it, esp cost-wise.
Lexmarks are just poo, plain and simple. Quality and speed are noticably inferior to the big three and they cost a fortune to run.
The reason I think Canon are so good is great perf in ALL areas. Very fast, very high quality prints (in all areas), very quiet (they even have a night-time mode), great drivers and incredibly cheap to run. Most compatible carts are top notch, I've found Jettec to be absolutely as good as Canon branded ones. Canon also seem to care more for the older printers too, HP and Epson are so slow on this (drivers eg for WinXP).