Printer Reviews

The Canon i900D is a remarkable color photo printer. Since receiving it, I have had no issues with the setup, instructions, print head or ink cartridges. I'm VERY impressed by this machine and strongly recommend it to anyone who wants professional quality print jobs from a medium- to higher-end color inkjet photo printer.

The six (6) individual color cartridges (included) are fantastic. I love the fact there are multiple cartridges. Instead of running out of yellow -- and having to replace an uber cartridge (which may have semi-full reserves of red and blue), I simply replace the yellow cartridge. No wasted ink cartridges. Canon offers quality, professional-grade ink, too. And the price has been reasonable when compared against other print manufacturers and their wares.

Despite large print runs, I haven't drained them quickly, like the prior HP color photo printer I owned (which also had individual cartridges), even with the same print output settings. And whether using Canon's Pro paper ($$$$) or plain white paper, I'm very impressed with the results.

I would offer this advise to Canon in the design of their future printers, though: 1.) Better paper tray capacity; 2.) memory card slot(s) on the front, akin to HP's design; 3.) networking capabilities; 4.) Linux print drivers/software; and 5.) include a USB connection cable, please!

I wanted the paper tray to hold more paper. As this is a photo printer, and not an office printer, I can understand the limited space.

While there aren't any memory card slots on the printer, there is a USB 2.0 A port on the front side, which my Kodak digital camera base connects to. (There is also a USB 2.0 B port on the printer's backside which can be used, depending on how you're connecting from the printer to your computer.) And I can use both the digital camera's LCD and the printer's LCD to preview/select the picture I want to print without downloading to the computer first. (If you prefer to run large print jobs, I would recommend downloading to the computer first and printing from there.) I would like to see Canon adopt memory card slots for the front of the machine, akin to what HP has been offering. I'd prefer to pull the memory card from my digital camera, insert into the printer and print that way.

I wish Canon (and other companies) would consider networking solutions within their printers. Yes, one computer on the network can serve as a print server (and if necessary, the USB cable can be simply moved from one machine to the other). I'd like to see either USB-based networking enabled, or wireless networking added to the next generation, though.

Linux drivers and software: Bring 'em on! 'Nuff said.

After much research on the web I chose this printer based on previous history of canon printers. When I received this printer I printed a 4X6 in less then 10 minutes out of the box. To my delight I was extremely impressed by the print. I printed some more pictures and was so impressed I had to take them to work. At work my friends were very impressed also. Some of these friends are plastic surgeons who are involved in digital and 35MM photography so to impress them tells a lot about this printer. I should of been a rep for Canon because I conviced many people to buy this printer. I compared these prints to others,no comparision. The Canon prints where much better and where as good as 35MM prints. As for cost of the prints the paper was 15 cents and the ink I don't know yet. But you can buy generic ink as low as 1.50 for each ink tank. So I would est. the cost of a print to be less than 20 cents. I would recommend this Printer without hesitation. Jan, 4, 2004. I've bought Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy from Amazon at 7.49 for 50 count. So far the ink has not even move after many pictures and black and white copies. At work at least 5 people have bought this printer and everyone has been extremely happy over the results.

I have used my new Cannon i960 for 60 days and I am very happy with the product. I have printed over 75 4X6 and 12 8X10 prints and have been completely satisfied with the product when using Cannon glossy paper. When I have used paper from a competitor there is a marked difference. When I show my prints to my friends they cannot believe that the pictures came from a printer. Photo lab quality.

My background: I'm a mac addict law student and need a laser printer for my legal work and class outlines.

I shopped around a lot for a new laser printer. I was going to buy an HP but my budget was $450. Unfortunately, I did not like the design of the low cost HP laser printers. The paper tray is kindly flimsy and it sticks out...not good with a 3 year old! So I decided to try a Brother. I just recieved my printer and was so excited to test it. I was very disappointed to find that it does not have a job layout option (which would allow me to print 2 pages side by side on the same paper). And that was the main reason I wanted a laser printer. Plus Brother is not fully mac compatable (some of the options can only be used with a PC).

Other than that, the printer is great. The quality is excellent and it has an automatic duplex printing function. So, if you don't need the job layout function, I would highly reccommend this printer. It was such a deal! If you buy this product, keep in mind that it DOES NOT include a cable. Buy one ahead of time.

I own a small newspaper that publishes every other week. I was looking for something to do black and white which was clear and quick to keep up with the workload. I was also in desperate need of something that printed out quality black and white photos and quality graphic images for use in the paper. I was hoping to get a quality grayscale. This printer is all of the above. The installation was very easy and it got better from there. If you are looking for a high quality printer for an excellent price, then this is the one to purchase. Thank you for a great product!

I've owned HP, and I've owned Lexmark. One can get cowed by the dominance of those companies in the marketplace, but I think that is too bad; consumers may limit themselves to bad choices when they don't look to other brands like Brother. I had a Lexmark that printed great -- but died *well* before its claimed life expectancy. So, I did not want to repeat that mistake. I wanted automatic duplex printing, and that requires at least a couple hundred dollars extra -- or more -- in any other brand, including HP, Xerox, etc. And just look at the price of upgrade parts on those guys! Brother has been around for a long time, and I felt it was worth giving them a try because the value was so much better. I've only had my 1650 for a few days but I feel very good about it. The setup was incredibly easy (used the parallel cable in Win98). And the included CD-ROM has animation that visually shows you every step of the printer set up! Of the printers I was considering, the Brother is the only one with a backlit LCD display with menus for features and settings (all of which are also controllable by software on the PC). The ergonomics are very good and the printer driver interfaces with my regular software just fine. The duplexing works great. It comes out of "sleep" mode pretty fast, while between print jobs it saves a lot of electricity. I haven't tried labels or anything but I put some fairly heavy cover stock through it, using the manual tray and rear exit tray, and had no problems at all. So far I have no complaints about the print quality. I'm not sure if it will match the Lexmark Optra R+ that it's replacing -- but this printer cost *half* as much as that one did, and the toner is also much cheaper. For text it's great, and the blacks are totally solid. I think that the inexpensive memory upgrade I've ordered for the Brother will improve the grayscale output even more, but I'm mostly looking for business use and this looks ideal. So far I've gotten all I could want: larger input capacity than I had before, auto duplexing, good quality, good speed, and a good selection of reasonably-priced upgrade options, like adding a second input drawer, networking, IRDA memory, and so on. And when I called Brother (toll-free!) for pre-sales information, I reached a person with virtually no hold time.

The HP 920c is a great low cost printer for the home or small office. Don't let the low price fool you, this guy does it all. I compared a full color photo print out with my HP 882 (2 years old) and the photo-like quality was superb. The set-up was a snap as the software guides the even newbies out there with fool-proof installation. This is a very quiet printer and the speed, not exactly super fast (want speed, buy a more expensive model!) was very good. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars was the limited 90 day warrenty. One tip if I may, use a USB connection for faster printing as the parallel connection is very slow to print in Best photo-quality mode.

The only thing that kept me from rating it 5 stars is the fact that the initial setup didn't go as smoothly as it should have.
It is so quiet that you very literally have to stand next to it to tell if it's printing. The print speed is fast enough; it's not extremely slow. This is not the model to get, however, if you're looking for lightning speed. I use a parallel port connection, so that is probably why there's a slight delay in getting the print information to the printer.
The print quality is OUTSTANDING! I only print photographs once-in-a-while, so I didn't buy the machine for that, but you can! Even on regular paper, the printed photographs don't even look computer generated.
After set-up, I'd give this printer a 5 star rating. It's a definate value for the money. I doubt the more expensive models would do much better.

I bought this 920C printer about a year ago. Until now, it still performs good. I love the printing results, the small size (6 point) characters are sharp and readable, the pictures are sharp and smooth, even with normal mode. I found that it's far better than my old 820Cxi. The dimension is so compact and lightweight, so I don't need more space to put it near my computer. However, the weakness of this printer is its integrated color ink tank. You have to replace it if there is one empty color, while the others are still half full. Honestly, I prefer the separated color ink tanks because they are more friendly to my wallet. Hope, in the near future, HP will make deskjet printers with separate ink tanks in economy prices without reducing quality.

This is my second Canon color inkjet. The first is just a printer, but based on my positive experience wiht that, I was confident in buying a Canon this time around as well. That confidence was reinforced with the MP730.

In a nutshell, the positives are:

- Surprisingly quick printing for an injet, even in color. Faster than the laser from just a few years ago that it replaces

- Excellent print quality -- tested it with color photos at full size and it's outstanding

- Very slick design... small footprint on the desk and looks good too.

- Both a flatbed AND fed copier -- this is very cool. I prefer to use the feeder most of the time (which is what my old multifunction had), but sometimes, if I'm copying a book or something, I wish I had a flatbed. This does both, again in a very compact size.

- Great Canon software and utilities for printing and other tasks

- Individually replaceable ink cartridges (saves money).

Just an outstanding unit -- I would have expected it to cost 2-3x it's price point.

The only downside, and this is a downside of inkjets generally, not the Canon specifically, is that ink is expensive and runs out faster than you think. Over the course of a couple years owning it, the cost of ink will likely outpace the cost of the printer itself.

But if you're deciding among multifunction units and among inkjets, this is a very good pick.

Even though more expensive than most competing products, this printer is worth the extra $$$. The print and copy speed is impressive. The print & copy quality is good on regular paper and is excellent on glossy photo paper. The fax quality is mediocre but I haven't experimented with the settings. Unlike some MFP's, the MP730 doesn't need the PC to copy or to send or receive a fax. I'm still using WIN98; the software installed quickly & easily and works very well. The unit is quiet and appears to be built to handle some abuse. The plastic seems to be heavier/thicker than that used on the HP's. The physical size is larger than fax or printer only units but it is the same size as comparable all-in-one models. The input paper tray is at the back of the machine so you can't push it flat against a wall but the MP730's output tray is slightly under the unit so the paper doesn't stick out as much as with the HP6110/7110. The advantage of the input tray at the back is a more straight through paper path which should result in less jams especially with thicker paper. The individual ink tanks should be less expensive in the long run. Depending on the volume, the initial price difference will be offset by on-going supply cost. Highly recommend.

Ok granted I've only had the unit a week or so...but it's been a really good week. Easy to get running and works like a dream, fax, scanner and copy unit are great and just printed out about a dozen foto's. This is a great buy.

My husband bought me this printer. I wanted the S600,but you were out of stock. After reading your reviews I decided to go with the S500. I am really satisfied. Great print quality and I love the individual ink tanks. Being an art teacher I am very particular about color quality..It's PURR-FECT and it has so much more ink. My old Canon printer had the colors in one. I didn't want an HP because of the all in one colors and the bottom loader. I really prefer the top load printer. This runs rings around my old Canon printer. Noise level isn't bad at all while printing. I have printed really....PURR-FECT pictures on regluar printing quality using card stock paper. When you put them in a frame they look like regular pictures. I am very HAPPY with the picture quality.
You'll Love it.... BUY ONE TODAY =^..^=

After recently purchasing this printer (Canon s500), based on the many good reviews it has received (including PC Magazine's Editor's Choice), I have got to agree this is a great printer for the price. The print quality is excellent, even on regular paper the color photos look very clean and sharp. This printer uses 4 different cartridges (black, cyan, magenta, and yellow) in the printhead, allowing you to only replace the color needed, rather than having to throw out a color cartridge that still has two of the three colors remaining. This will save lots of $ over the life of your printer. Also the replacement cartridges are quite a bit cheaper than the ones I have bought for my previous printer. Overall, I am very happy with the choice I made. Great printer!

This is a great printer, which is probably why Canon stopped making it. There are no special print cartridges needed to print photos. I used photo paper and the regular cartridges and made great photos. This was the mistake of Canon, they made an inexpensive printer that would print photos cheaply and realized they were going to lose a bunch of money not selling photo cartridges. Hopefully they will make another printer like this. The printing is very fast, almost as fast as my laser, quiet, and of exceptional quality. If you can find it buy it, you won't regret it.

My father decided he needed a digital camera. So, we needed to decide what to buy. We picked the Kodak 6340 and this docking station.

Why? My father computer abilities are AOL and not much more, so I wanted him to buy something simple and easy to use. I had shown him how to print pictures on his HP printer, but that hasn't really worked out.

For printing:
When you plug the camera into the docking station, it automatically turns on the LCD on the camera. From the LCD, you can select using button on the docking station which photos you want to print and then you just hit the print button. You can print individual pictures or index prints of everything loaded on the camera. You can also print from Kodak's EasyShare software. No configuration other than picking the pictures and printer is required.

Loading the paper is just like loading a photocopier. You pull out a tray, and place the photopaper right in. Again very easy to use. However, you need special paper for this printer. It will not use non-Kodak photopaper. The photopaper is sold with the ink. Paper/ink for 40 photos run $25. Very expensive!!! You can however print your photos with no computer, so it might also make sense for those want to print the camera with them and print photos while traveling.

Photo quality seems excellent. I recently bought a Canon i950 and this little printer seems to do just as well, if not better.

For syncing your pictures to the computer
The docking station with Kodak software is really easy to use. 1 button syncs your pictures/video automatically to the computer.

It also charger your camera. A rechargeable Ni-MH battery is included and fits the 6340 camera or other Kodak cameras compatible with the docking station.

So, very easy to use, but very expensive. I'd say its great novice computer/electronic users, but for others there are many cheaper and better alternatives.

This is the $199 (or less) Kodak EasyShare 6000 Printer Dock. It performs all the same functions as the EasyShare 6000 Dock (charges the camera's NiMH battery pack that comes with the printer dock, downloads images and movie clips to the computer via the USB port and connects to a TV for slideshows) plus it's a high quality 4x6-inch (10x15cm) borderless dye transfer printer.

This is a dye transfer printer, not an inkjet. The printing is accomplished by a four-pass process, one for each color (cyan, yellow and magenta) and the forth pass applies the XtraLife protective overcoat.

Usint the controls you can print the current picture (default), print the pictures that have been preselected using the Share button, print all, or print an index sheet. The "-" and "+" buttons lets you scroll throught he pictures stored in the camera and print whatever is shown on the LCD.

The indicators across the top warn if the paper is out, show the level of charge in the camera battery and tell you when it is time to replace the ribbon cartridge.

The print packs contain the ribbon cartidge and two packs of printing paper with 20 sheets in each pack. The ribbon is good for all 40 prints, breaking the paper down into two packages helps keep it fresher.

To make a "perfect" 4x6-inch borderless print you use the camera's Best (3:2) quality mode. The 3:2 aspect ratio yields an image that fits perfectly on the 4x6-inch paper with no cropping required, your entire image is printed. The white borders you see on this print are break-away tabs that you remove after the print is finished.

When printing images captured with the other quality settings some cropping will occur.

Yesterday I purchased the Kodak printer dock 6000 to go along with my Kodak Cx6330 digital camera. So far I am very pleased. The first thing I noticed about this printer dock is the size. It's small enough to sit on my little desk with extra room. Secondly, it was a breeze to set up. It took, at most, 10 minutes. Make sure you have you custom insert handy in case the universal insert is not to your liking.

The price for this printer dock is great. Having a "printing lab" in your room for under $150? That's pretty cool. Luckily, I received a 256 MB MC with this purchase free (about a $100 value). This printer comes with a sample pack of 10 4 x 6's. It has a sample printer cartridge. It's definitely a sample. It printed out about 10 photos before telling me I need to replace the cartridge. That being said, I recommend buying a set of 4 X 6's and color cartridge.

Speaking of which, this printer dock only prints 4 X 6 photographs. Not a problem for me, but may be for others. The Kodak printer dock 6000 prints beautiful photographs quickly. First it prints the yellows, then reds, and finally, the blues. The photo quality is superb.

Using this printer dock with my computer is a great option. I am able to print off photographs stored on my computer or edit all photographs before printing. I am not sure if this can be done without the computer, but I can also center the photographs. This way I do not lose any of the photograph while removing the perforated edges. This may not matter to some, but to me it is a very important aspect in making the images look their best.

I do not see any reason to not rate the Kodak Printer Dock 6000 less than 5 stars. If there is, I will edit my review. :)

I was in the market for a portable printer to use with my Fujitsu Lifebook. The portable markey is pretty small, being that there are only a very few printers that are small enough to be called portable, but still print on full-size paper.

At first I didn't like anything available. I checked in depth but nothing out there really caught my eye. One day I strolled on over to Canon's website and what did I see, but the i70 listed as "Coming Soon!"

I decided to hold off on buying a printer until I could see the i70 in person, which I later did. It's beautiful. It's sort of a platinum silver color, with a rich blue printhead cover. It closes easily and a small magnet keeps the bottom sheet-feeder attached to the top cover (it's way cooler than I'm describing it...)

Installation was a snap. Typical of Canon. I'm running Windows XP and I have no problems in the slightest.

The first thing I noticed is that it's quiet. I didn't think it was really printing until I saw the paper coming out.

Second: it's FAST. It's the fastest inkjet printer I've ever used, beating out my HP 1120C in both speed, noise, and print quality.

It's not labled as a photo printer, but the print quality of the i70 is just amazing. If there's a difference between this and real photo printers, I haven't seen it, nor do I care. It's good. VERY good.

I have not tested the infrared communications yet... I send everything to the printer via USB, which is a breeze.

To sum it up:

Pros:

Appearence
Speed
Noise
Quality

Cons:
Not the same silver as other Canon products (such as the LiDe30) but it's still so pretty...

I HIGHLY recommend this printer.

THE GOOD:

(1) This is the lightest printer among peers. HP's 450cbi, the closest alternative in my book, is nowhere near as portable as the i70.

(2) Prints directly from a digicam. I use Canon's G3, and I can now share photo print-outs straight from my camera. No need to lug my laptop around.

(3) The battery life is great, don't believe detractors. IN general you don't need the battery -- that is only for outings, for those occasions when you just have to print out something while sitting by the lake.

(4) It is FAST! Especially for color prints, it outpaces my full-blown HP laserjet.

(5) It is QUIET. You'll have to get used to its noiseless printing. First time round, I had to check to make sure the paper was printed on.

(6) Is a breeze to INSTALL. Something you can expect from Canon, of course.

(7) Works with both Windows and Macs.

CAVEATS:

(1) The photo quality may not appeal to shutterbugs, especially if NOT printed on photo paper, but for general office workers with little desk space or for folks with a packed travel roster, the i70 is a pretty safe bet.

(2) The ink costs may sky rocket quite quickly if you print colored stuff often. If, like me, your general printing is B&W, then this is a great buy.

(3) The price, especially if you buy the battery pack. But there are deals if you know where to look.

SUMMARY:

A great overall printer, definitely if you need to carry one around. I purchase Epson's photo paper (not Canon's own) for color shots and the i70 prints more than adequately. The speed, the quality and the quietness make it one of my top printer recommendations -- all things said, even better than a regular inkjet.

I needed a small portable printer for my laptop, and after researching them, I chose the Canon i70. It has all of the attributes I needed-lightweight,super easy to use, fast as the office rumor mill, and a great print job. I highly recommend this product to anyone fortunate enough to have purchased it.

I use a Brother HL-1240 laser printer for its speed and economy (two and a half years without having to change toner), plus I use an Olympus P-400 for printing superb photographs and graphics. When the need arrived to print on CDs and DVDs, it did not take long to find that we have limited choices; to pay a thousand bucks or more for a decent CD printer, or try to save a little money and buy a lower quality printer with dubious dependability. Neither choice was appealing.

The arrival of Epson's 900 and 960 printers were an instant success for my needs. A quality brand with factory backing, plus pricing that is reasonable. Although the 900 is about a hundred dollars less expensive, I chose the 960 for its better features of having separate ink cartridges (we all know how expensive ink cartridges can be), plus the 960 has a much higher photo quality rating. I estimate that with as much ink as I will be using, the 960's long-term cost will be about equal to that of the 900's.

In actual use, the 960 is less than half as fast as an inexpensive laser printer, but the graphic quality is noticably better. While the laser printer's graphics are 300 dpi and look good, the Epson's output is smoother and better detailed even when on the minimal quality setting. If you are not concerned about speed and do not need more than a few copies of any one page, the Epson will do a fine job. For those of us with laser printers without an envelope tray, the Epson's tray is very much appreciated and allows for printing large quantities of envelopes in a much shorter time.

For photographs, nothing I have found even comes close to the Olympus P-400, but the Epson 960 still produces very nice quality prints with excellent color tones. As with all bubble jets, lines will be noticeable which lessen the photo's quality, so be aware that even though your prints will be very nice looking, they will not have a photo-quality finish. Now that the price of the Olympus P-400 has dropped and is not much more expensive than the Epson 960, if your main goal is printing serious photographs, go with the Olympus.

Now, for the main reason I bought the 960, for printing on CDs, it's great! Beautiful! Yes, for everyone who wants to make CDs and DVDs with a professional finish, the 960 is *the* way to go. Two thumbs up for CD printing!

All in all, just like all printers, each will have its own advantages and disadvantages. The 960 is not real fast, but it's good, better than most bubble jets, and while photo printing isn't the best, it's much better than almost all others I have seen. The 960's strength is in its versitility of being able to do many different types of printing, and do them all very well. Just as with all products, no printer is perfect, there will always be little things to annoy different people, but overall the 960 is pretty decent. After shopping numerous different retailers, I ordered mine from Amazon simply because all of my past experiences with Amazon have always been trouble-free.

If I had to settle for just one printer, I would keep the 960.

This is not a technical opinion. I am an amateur photographer with an expesive hobby. I have spent several thousand dollars on a Nikon D100 DSLR camera, lenses, accesories, and software. I normally use a high quality photo lab for my prints because I care about the color quality. I bought the printer to use it for proof before sending it to the lab, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the quality of the Epson 960 when compared to the lab prints. Now, I am thinking of saving myself from going to the lab for my regular 8x10 or smaller prints. In a couple of words, I LOVE THIS LITTLE PRINTER!

I replaced my Epson 785 DCS with this printer and all I can say is...WOW. Right out of the box with no color tweaking/color matching/ICC profiles, etc. it is printing almost exactly what I see on the screen. Once I get a chance to fine tune the colors it should be excellent. I recently had two digital prints done at my local pro photo finishing lab and side-by-side I can't tell the difference between them...in fact I think I like the ones I printed a tad better.

The only thing I don't like about it is that it can't print wider than 8.5 inches because it certainly has the quality to do so. I wish I could afford the 2200 which can print wider...but this is great for "normal" size prints.

The technical detail:

a. The printer may be operated as a standalone product independant of a computer. It contains slots for both SmartMedia cards and compact flash PC card adaptors so you don't have to have a computer connected to the printer to use it. The printer has its own small LCD display which can be used in lieu of a computer interface to help you select pictures off your cards for printing and the printer also has a rather sophisticated built in capability to format the final product.

b. The printer has both a parallel port and a USB port for computer connection and is compatible with both PCs and MACs. Configuration software is included on CD for both types of machines. No computer cables are included and will cost you about $20 at your local computer store.

c. If connected to a computer, the printer is used to provide printed output for whatever photo editing software you already own. No computer photo editing software is included with the package.

d. Documentation is complete and voluminous. However, the technical document giving all the nitty gritty is provided as a computer PDF file readable by Adobe Acrobat software (supplied in multiple languages) and is not provided hardcopy. If you are buying this printer to use as a standalone device without a computer, this puts you at somewhat of a disadvantage.

e. The starter kit of paper and printer ribbon is adequate to print only five (5) 8x10" prints so you will want to purchase paper and ribbon with the printer.

f. Printing supplies (paper and ribbon) are expensive, costing almost $2 per 8x10" print.

The Subjective data:

The final print produced is 314x314 dots per inch and looks incredible. I have standard 8x10" Kodak prints produced from my digital photos that do not look nearly as good. Unless you are going to take your digital data to a custom printing specialist and stand over his shoulder, you will not be able to obtain a print better than this printer will give you. Recently, I was trying to restore an old 8x10" photo and scanned it into my computer at the highest resolution possible, edited it in Adobe Photoshop, and wound up with a wonderful restoration. By that time the digital image was up to 58MB size. I asked Kodak to print it, and they did. However, their system couldn't handle the large file size and compressed it to slightly over 2MB. Their final print was acceptable but a lot of the detail and my work was lost because of the compression. My computer fed the entire 58MB file to this printer and it produced a superb picture that made the Kodak image look like a childs effort in comparison. I don't know of any printer today that has comperable capability to the Olympus P400.

I have owned this printer for nearly two years. It has been trouble-free and has given me hundreds of beautiful pictures that have the look and feel of high-quality photo prints. I use Photoshop Elements to clean-up my images and to size them for printing. Photoshop elements allows me to place multiple images on a full sheet of paper. I recently showed some travel photos to a friend. He said, "I've seen digital pictures before but never any that looked this beautiful! What kind of a camera do you have?" I told him that it wasn't the camera, it was the printer. The printer, itself, is not hard to set up and use. At first , you must pay attention to how you load the ribbon, but if you look carefully at the instructions, you will be fine. A negative review mentions the micro lesions on the surface of the prints. It is true that there are a few extremely fine scratches on the plastic surface of each page . However, you will never notice them unless you take them to a window and tilt the picture around to catch the light just so. In normal viewing, you will never know they are there. And they are only on the clear, plastic coating that covers the pigments on the paper. (The paper makes four passes over the thermal head. Three passes put the color on, the fourth applies a protective coating of clear plastic.) The drawback to this printer is that it will not print larger than 8X10, and not quite a true 8X10 at that. Personally, that has never bothered me. I don't do a lot of 8X10's, and when I do, I put a border around the print, put it in a frame and it's fine. The quality of the pictures continually amazes everyone I show them to. I think this is a great photo printer.

Finally, a dye sublimation photo printer that gives you prints larger than 4" x 6"! The colors are rich, and the pictures are very sharp. There is nothing on the market today that is in this printer's class. If anyone is interested in quality prints of digital images, this printer is an absolute must have. I would recommend printing images that were taken with at least a 2 megapixel digital camera. I have an HP Photosmart P1000 printer that does very well, but it cannot compete with the P400. You can't achieve the same quality print with an ink jet printer.

BEWARE! DO NOT UPGRADE FROM WINDOWS 98 TO WINDOWS XP IF YOU WANT YOUR 1270 TO WORK PROPERLY EVER AGAIN! I have had my 1270 since Aug. 2001 and it has worked exceptionally well and produced award winning prints. I would have rated it 5 stars until I made the mistake of upgrading my system from Windows 98 to Windows XP. I had visted the Epson site to make sure they had a download for Windows XP, 1270 drivers. Sure enough, they did. What they didn't say, is that the printer really won't work at all satisfactorily after the conversion to XP and after downloading and installing the two programs from the Epson site. After three support emails, and, in their favor, receiving three quick answers with instructions on how to overcome the problems my printer was having, it still does not work. And, trust me, I followed the instructions to the "T". Why would Epson put the download on their site without making sure it would work? Entirely unsatisfactory experience. BEWARE! DO NOT UPGRADE FROM WINDOWS 98 TO WINDOWS XP IF YOU WANT YOUR 1270 TO WORK PROPERLY EVER AGAIN!

As an IT administrator for an engineering firm, extremely high quality is a total concern. Working with some of the most detail oriented people in the world, I have to be absolutely positively sure that all of my purchases meet or surpass expectation levels of incredible standards.

This one passed. No one could tell which photo in my travel albums were Epsoned or Emulsioned.

I have purchased the HP890Cse in the past and that printer was stunning for its time. However, we have found that with all HP inks, the colors shift badly under standard office lighting in just under a year. Luckily, the documents from the 890 were not reprographic runs involving digital photos. Forget that if I have to redo my photo album every year. This is a dirty little secret that you must pay attention to when purchasing any photo printer - IS IT LIGHTFAST? HOW LONG IS IT LIGHTFAST? WHAT THE HELL IS LIGHTFAST? etc etc...

The 1270 uses inks that are rated for 25 years. This translates to 15 REAL years in the REAL world with REAL people.

Other features of this printer include tabloid size prints and ink level status on the properties menu. If you're screwey enough like me, you'll find a way to reset the out-of-ink parameter on the carts and also a way to print stunning photos using KODAK and HP PAPERS as well as Epson's. I have dropped this printer from a table and wrenched jammed paper out with metal pliers (actually it was cardboard). It functions as if brand new ... well, almost new .... relatively speaking that is ..... sort of ..... you know ..... OK it sounds like it has asthma now.

The only real problems I ran into is that Autocad plots do not print correctly using the default system printer parameter and only one page at a time can be sent if the 1270 is connected to an ethernet print server with no bi-directional capability. EPSON PROGGIES - PLEASE REWRITE YOUR DRIVERS.

For truly amazing prints that SURPASS 35mm emulsion prints, check out Epson's Pro 5500. Its a printer that uses a new DX3 print head with drops that cannot be seen with the naked eye. I would not dare drop this one.

I tried shopping around locally for Epson printers and was told, that Hewlett Packard was the "only way to go," and that I would be "extremely disappointed in the 1440 x 720 resolution."

Hogwash. My Epson 1270 gives me amazing photo-quality prints. I couldn't be happier with it. The ink cartridges seem to last a reasonable amount of time, and really aren't that expensive.

As everyone has mentioned, you've got to use Epson paper to get the best results, but why wouldn't you? It's relatively inexpensive and gives magnificent results!

Well worth the money... and it's even been marked down from what I paid!