Canon can….

Last year my HP all-in-one printer gave up the ghost. To be honest, it had been on its way for a while, and I was extremely disappointed, as we’d only had it for a couple of years. It fell foul to what seems to be a general issue with HP ink-jet printers (it also happened to the one I had before this and I’ve read of plenty of cases of it on other sites) - the print heads deteriorate or get clogged up or just plain stop working and coupled with the fact that it stopped thinking it had any ink (even when I’d put a new cartridge in – and yes they’re true HP carts) led me to decide to ditch it. Extreme yes, but I just lost patience as I just couldn’t do anything to fix it, and couldn’t locate the spares to replace the print-heads. This brings me on to a complaint about the HP website and how any spares you find are either not available, or are in US dollars and ultimately not available! Just rubbish for a UK consumer – get it sorted HP!

Having been through exactly the same issues with the previous HP, I decided third time would not be lucky and to look at other manufactures – HP had shot itself in the foot as far as I was concerned. In looking around, my eye wandered to Canon, an obvious choice given that I’m a Canon camera user and have been very pleased and impressed with its gear. So I started looking at the Pixma range and specifically the all-in-ones as I like to have the scanning/copying function to give me a proper home office set-up.

In the end I plumped for the MG8250, which was on sale on Amazon for £210. A great deal as the RRP was something like £299. But to add to the financial incentives, Canon was also offering a £30 cashback on this model (I’m still waiting for my cheque Mr. Canon!) so the overall cost was £180 – a steal!

When the printer arrived I was seriously impressed. I had read that it could be difficult to set-up as a firmware upgrade was required to make the wireless work properly, but I had no problems at all, following the quick set-up instructions I was up and running within 30 minutes. It’s a fine-looking specimen and I have to say, as I’m into my gadgets, it ticks all the boxes. It also comes with Canon’s 7 cartridge ink system which appears to give pretty good printer quantities, but the proof will be in the eating and we’ll see how it fares given we’re not heavy users.

So far I’ve printed one black and white image of Daughter #1 and this has come out a treat on some nice (albeit HP) glossy paper. The finish is superb, it’s been very simple to use and change settings on (through the printer software control panel) and was quick. I’ve also used the scanner, which has produced a really good quality scan at a low DPI.

All in all, I’m very pleased, but will report back once I’ve had a chance to really put it through its paces with some larger, better quality hi-res prints.