this printer is pretty old- it's unlikely you'll fine one for sale new- so if you're on the second hand market there are some issues to look out for. The waste ink tray can get full over time, and when it gets full you will get smudges of ink on your paper, there might be a fix for this, but the best thing to do is search for a low useage printer.

I bought this printer back when taking things to the print shop was so expensive that it was cheaper to buy this printer that pay for prints of 60+ A3 full colour sheets.
Print economy is good, I use it a lot and the inks never seem to go down even for photo printing, they're also quite cheap to replace.

The printer is very noisy but can be made considerably quieter by switching to night time mode. It is a fairly quick printer, but no speed demon. It takes up a lot of desk space even when stowed away, but A3 printers are always massive so that's not really a negative.

The main issue with this printer is print quality, the black and white output of this 4 ink printer is understandably disappointing for a printer with only one black, it' s ok unless you've seen the same shot printed on a 12 colour inkjet, or a £1,000,000 ZBE chromira LED laser printer, and the colour output is great for text and graphics but lacks depth for colour photo prints- I also had issues with very rapid fading (2 weeks left on a window sill and the print had nearly vanished) but that was with third party paper. It's ok for printing photos for home, but i'd never do client photos on it.

I am running low on ink, and once I run out this time, I don't think I'll be buying new cartridges and instead i'll be looking at the new 9500 pro.

if you see one cheap, then consider it, but I think that epson printers of this era were better than this canon

update: one more thing, the ix5000 is the exact same printer, just a little faster