We bought this printer as friends of ours had raved about how cheap the ink cartridge refills were to buy, and we've had it for about eighteen months.

It is really handy to have the capability to copy, scan and fax really easily, although the quality of scanned documents isn't great. I've not used it as a fax machine as yet though, as we don't have a phone line in the room that the printer is in.

I have to say, I am not very impressed with this model for several reasons.

Firstly, the ink cartridges are very cheap, available in Tesco and Argos for about £7 each (black ink and colour ink are sold separately), but they don't last very long. I probably do an average amount of basic printing (not massive amounts), but find the cartridges run out after about a month. Also, if one runs out, the printer will not work (i.e. if the colour cartridge runs out, you can't print in black and white until it is replaced). I have had much cheaper printers in the past, and while the ink cartridges have been slightly more expensive, they have lasted longer. This suggests that buying the printer on the basis of cheaper ink is a bit of a false economy.

Secondly, I have some real issues with the quality of printed documents. I have found that no matter how full the black ink cartridge is, if you don't select "best quality" in the printer options, the print comes out quite vague and stripey. Economy mode is almost unreadable.

The only other (slight) issue I have with this is that it is a huge printer! While I understand that it needs to be bigger to house the scan/copy facilities, mine currently has its own desk, so not very practical.

In conclusion, the strengths of this printer are:
- photo printing quality is good
- its handy to have all capabilities in one machine
but, in my opinion (as somebody who uses the printer mainly for simple black and white documents), the quality is inferior, and I would suggest shopping around a bit.


However, on the occasions that we have used this to print photographs (on photo paper), the quality has been quite good.