The best printer I've ever used! (Canon i560)

Member Name: monkeywarrior

Product:	Canon i560
Date:	30/05/04 (1032 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Top quality printouts, Very fast and quiet, Low running costs

Disadvantages: Styling a bit iffy, A bit bulky

I purchased my Canon i560 printer and spare cartridges for it from the wonderful ebuyer.com for the bargain price of around £100. I'd recommend shopping around though if you intend to buy one.

Although this initially seems like quite a bit for mid-range inkjet, you must bear in mind that the cartridges are simply ink tanks and can be found for around £3 each per colour. Also the ink lasts for ages so this works out a very cheap printer to run.

I bought it in replacement of my old Epson Stylus 680, a hideous printer which was unreliable, not particularly good quality and cost an absolute fortune to run thanks to its 'chipped' cartridges. But thats a whole other story.

The i560 is an attractive enough looking machine, although sadly sticks with the usual beige colour scheme which may not fit in with some more modern systems. Its extremely easy to set up, the manuals and software are pretty decent and if you get stuck I've found Canon's technical support to be excellent.

The software allows for near endless tweaking of print settings to get the best possible print quality, but just sticking with the usual settings of draft, normal and high quality works fine for me.

Mono text printouts are exceptionally fast, also very black and sharp. It takes close examination to make out these aren't from a professional laser printer.

Standard quality graphical printouts are again very very fast and of excellent quality. However its when you start printing photos that the printer really begins to shine.

You'll need some decent quality photo paper to get the most out of it but boy does it produce results. Photos are vibrant, glossy and realistic, with excellent colour separation and no bleeding or smearing. The printer also supports edge to edge printing allowing you to produce full-page A4 prints at
top quality for a fraction of the price of such a print at a photo developers.

Other features include both USB and parallel interfaces as well as a direct print socket for suitably equipped cameras.

All in all, I'd say this is the best printer I've ever used, and if you're willing to put in a little extra money at the point of buying then you'll save this money tenfold in the running costs which are miniscule - as well as producing some wonderful printouts!

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