Deciding on printers.. Canon or HP

[HimeNoHogosha]

Deciding on a new printer for myself. I won't be using it excessively often, but when I will use it I want it to be pretty nice... so speed and ink costs don't really matter to me but quality does.

So I've always been a big fan of Canon. My parents bought a S400 camera and I'm the one who plays around with it. But I'll be moving to my own apartment soon so I won't have a digicam.. for a while. After reading the recent printer reviews on AnandTech I thought about getting an i450, since the quality seemed to be better than the others and only slower than the i850. But now I hear there's an i560 out. How does that compare with the i450?

Also, the prices for the HP 7150 and 5550 have both been at the 100 mark for a while now too. But I don't really know how the qualities compare with eachother or to the Canon printers. Anybody able to comment on this for me? I'm trying to keep the printer as under $100 as I can.

Thanks.

 

[gsaldivar]

If you go for an HP, you'll probably have to set aside another $100 for some ink to go with it...

Canon ink on the other hand...

 

[Tennoh]

Go for the Canon. Most of the HP inkjets do not have individual ink cartridges for the various colours. Gets to be expensive to replace ink just to replace one colour that ran out. Canons on the otherhand have individual cartridges per primary colour.

 

[corkyg]

I have had both. I soured on Canon because, even though they have individual ink carts, they have a cleaning system that can get filled. Also, in time, the print head must be replaced, and that is over $125. With H-P you get a fresh print head with ever cartridge. Over time, I find H-P to present fewer problems.

 

[Macro2]

Canon i560, i850 or photo i950.

I'll never buy another HP again. Can't afford $20,000 a gallon for ink.

As far as printheads...by the time you have to replace a Canon printhead you'll be looking for another printer. The newest ones are ceramic and tough as nails.
You can refill canon BCI-3 and 6 cartridges with great success. Or buy generics for as little as $1.45 each.
There are no generic HP cartridges, just refills and they are hit or miss. Just go price HP cartridges and you'll see what I mean.

Mac

 

[Peter]

Just for the records, HP printers do have an ink deposal sponge in the basement as well. Unlike the Canon printers that request to be serviced after many years of printing, just to make sure that sponge doesn't fill up, the HP printers keep printing until the ink oozes away from the filled sponge and floods something important.

I've been doing printer maintenance for more than 15 years. I've seen it happen. (Cynics might say, today's consumer models from HP are flimsy enough to not see that problem ever ... by the time the sponge is even half full, something else breaks.)

In all those years, I had to do the ink sponge service on a mere two units - one BJC-4000 from ten years ago that complained about "sponge full" this spring, and a BJC-70 notebook printer of about the same age that had been abused as a home office printer. The irony of course being that these two were within a day of each other, with the same customer

 

[tomcas1]

Printer manufactures are like razor manufactures. They sell their main product at a loss and make it up by locking you into the consumables.
In the case of HP, it?s the cartridges they nail you on. You can get around this by refilling. I have had excellent luck doing my own refills and its dirt cheap, but to some people it can be a real pain especially when it comes to resetting the level detection. I'd say HP is middle of the road for picture printing performance, high for text and graphic printing on plain paper, and high in reliability, which is due in part to the fact that changing the cartridge also changes the print head.
I like the new Canons especially for their blazing picture printing speeds and optic ink tank level detection. These inks tanks will begin to appear from after market sellers at dirt cheap prices. The down side is I'm not convinced of the print head longevity despite the previous post and while they are replaceable they are also extremely expensive especially the high end models which have double the normal jet count. I'm also uncertain as to their general durability.