What a fantastic printer this is.

I bought this printer what must be nearly 6 years ago now when I got my first job working at PC World. After some demonstrations from a Canon sales rep that was in store I was sold.

The printer contains five seperate inks, two black, cyan, magenta and yellow. The reasoning behind two black cartridges is that this allows the printer to store one black cartridge soley for text printing, useful if you print out photos by the dozen but don't want to be caught short when printing that important last minute letter.

The photo print quality is stunning, even by todays standards I'm thoroughly pleased by it, offering edge to edge printing on sizes up to A4 with speeds that won't dissapoint you. The text quality is similarly high offering sharp, crisp print outs with the added bonus of automatic duplex (back to back) printing so as not to waste paper. The printer also supplies some pretty decent printing software, though if you plug in you can plug and play without this stuff too.

Paper storage is brilliant with top and bottom loading allowing you to load 60% of a ream of paper at once means you could effectively use this as a laser alternative if you really wanted to as you can set the printer to automatically use both trays, or if like me you use it for photo and text printing? Load one with nice photo paper and one with copier paper, simply use the switch on the front to chose which to use, or go into print preferences.

Also on the front of this printer is a USB port for pictbridge compatible cameras allowing you to print without the need to use your computer at all if you want to.

The ink can be dear, but then which photo printer isn't? Look at the cost of ink and you'll never complain about the price of petrol again (£10 for 9ml or the sort? that's about £900 per litre ;-) ) Still you pay for good results I suppose and that's what you'll get from this, time after time.