List Price: $129.99
Sale Price: $87.68
Today's Bonus: 33% Off
Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program .
Lots to like about this printer. Well designed, loads of features. Keeping it fed is the problem.
If it starts to feel like an expensive drug habit, see "8 ways to lower your ink costs" below.
Or consider the Brother MFCJ870DW which cooperates with value-priced 3rd party inks.
Ink Cost: It Adds Up -
This little $90 printer may cost you $1000 to $2000 over a 5 year period. With easy $45 installments, Canon hopes you won't do the supply-gouge math.
To get the party started ASAP, Canon ships the printer with cartridges that are 30% and 45% full. (Or 70% and 55% empty if you prefer. See Note 1 for Canon ink details.)
The ink refills (240 and 241 series) include a chip and the actual print heads. This discourages knock-offs. (It also means any print head problem is easily solved with a new cartridge.) You can refill the cartridges with 3rd party refill kits, but apparently you also need a chip reset if you want the refilled cartridge to report ink levels correctly.
PROs and CONs -
PROs:
Lots of handy features
Print quality seems good
WiFi connect (requires wireless router)
Print directly from mobile devices
Clean, attractive design
Ease to use: buttons are easy to read, and make sense
OKs:
1 year warranty
Setup: Reasonably easy, with some confusing moments
Owner manual: On CD. No printed manual. Good navigation, reasonably clear and complete
Footprint is 16" x 17.6" (12" x 17.6" when paper tray not in use.)
Black exterior shows dust
Standby power: 1.65 watts with (WiFi on). Zero or unmeasurable wattage when switched off.
CONs:
* Expensive ink (like most inkjet printers. See Note 3)
* High-tech cartridges make 3rd party ink much more difficult
Combined 3-color cartridge 10% to 30% of color ink may be wasted
No hard-wired networking option
Auto shut-off: Nice energy-saving idea, but doesn't work in most situations (see Note 2).
Alternatives -
Brother MFCJ870DW (cooperates with 3rd party inks)
Epson Artisan 730 (cartridge chips thwart 3rd party ink suppliers)
Pricing -
Price bounces between 88 and 98. There's an "Online Price Alert" that will email you whenever this or any amazon product dips below your target price. Google it. Or try camelcamelcamel.
Eight ways to lower your ink costs -
1. Buy a printer that uses more affordable inks. Step 1: Discover a planet where printer companies charge their ink customers less than 800% of manufacturing cost. If that's too much trouble, get the Brother MFCJ870DW and use 3rd party cartridges.
2. Own a laser printer and use it most of the time. The Brother MFC7860DW, Brother HL-2270DW, and their siblings have the lowest supply cost around. About 1-2 cents per page vs 12-25 cents per (non-photo) page for most inkjets.
3. Inconvenience is your friend. On the off chance that your kids, spouse, or office staff don't know or care about what things cost, put your color printer off the beaten path. Upstairs...powered off...barbed wire...you get the idea. It's a silent reminder that the color printer is not for random everyday use.
4. Buy the XL and XXL cartridges. The cheaper PG-240 and CL-241 are twice as expensive per milliliter of ink.
5. Preview each print job and reduce the page range when possible. Especially when printing Web pages.
6. Shrink your printing...2 pages-to 1, 4-to-1 etc. when it make sense. Make sure everybody knows how easy this is to do.
7. Holiday letters: 20% to 50% of your loved ones would be happier with an emailed holiday letter. Print your letter to a pdf file with the free and easy-to-use CutePDF software.
8. Ink Refill Kits: ND Brand Refill ink kit for Canon PG-240, CL-241, ND 1000ml refill ink kit for Canon PG-240 CL-241, etc. They drop your ink cost to 1/10 or 1/30 of Canon cost. But they're kind of a hassle, there are not many reviews yet, and apparently your refilled cartridge will not report ink levels correctly without a chip reset. Quality seems unknown at this point. Also, if your cartridge print head wears out after a few refills, the savings will be less than stated above.
Notes -
Note 1: Canon Ink Choices: PG-240 and CL-241 are starter cartridges 30% and 45% full. PG-240XL and CL-241XL give you about 1.7 to 2.2 times as many pages. That's about 300-400 standard (ISO/IEC 24712) test pages. PG-240XXL is a fully topped off Black cartridge that gives about 3.3 times the output of a PG-240. There is no XXL color cartridge. For more detail, google "Canon Inkjet page yields".
Note 2: Auto shut off is easily set for 15 to 240 minutes (or Never) but mine never shuts off. Apparently because "The Auto power off setting is invalid when using the machine via network."
Note 3: Ink Cost Studies: QualityLogic's impressive side-by-side comparison of ink costs (per page) says this model's ink cost is higher than average, but their numbers do not reflect savings from XL and XXL cartridges. It's going to take more digging to do a fair comparison. Google "QualityLogic ink cost analysis".
~~~ Comments & questions welcome ~~~
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