In addition to a whole lot of chatting, advice getting, seeing friends, catching up with old buddies, playing some awesome wrestling games on Nintendo Wii over New Years, and eating tons of Jutan family cooking, I also managed to plan the flights and accommodation for almost our entire upcoming Europe trip as well as research and buy a new printer. :) Good vacation!!
My old HP DeskJet dried up and has been printing in pink only for the last 6 months, and my old Canon CanoScan scanner is from 2001 in Newcastle, Australia. Needless to say, there are no drivers for 64-bit Windows 7!
As such, it was time for one of those famed "All-in-One" printers. I thought they might suck cause they are trying to do too much at once, but really they are pretty amazing now. I wanted to switch away from HP and it looked like either Canon or Lexmark (or HP) had high marks on the CNet ratings. I ended up going with the "Canon PIXMA MG5220 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-In-One" - long word, but awesome printer.
It was only $89 on Amazon which is pretty solid, and seemed the best bang for the buck. I was also looking a couple models up at the Canon PIXMA MG8120 ($220) and sideways at the Canon PIXMA MX870 ($140).
The MX870 is an "Office InkJet" meaning it has an auto-feeder which is cool, but it's a bit larger and heavier. It also has a fax which is utterly useless since I don't have a landline and I'll be sad that I can't send any faxes.
The MG8120 is the fancied-up version of the MG5220, and it's essentially the same as the MG5220 except it's (slightly) faster to print, has a higher-res scanner, has a dedicated grey ink added to the CMYK+extra black, and comes with a film negative scanner plate (which actually I was considering using). Given that I'm probably going to eventually send my 100+ rolls of old negatives to ScanCafe or a similar service, I decided to save the extra $150 (difference between the MG5220 and the MG8120) and I'll spend it on getting someone else to automatically scan my 100,000,000 negatives for me. Good choice I think.
So after all that, why stick with the $89 MG5220? Well, it's the cheapest model that still has all the features I wanted: duplex-printing, the separated C, M, Y colour cartridges (rather than having only 1 dedicated colour cartridge), fast print speed, a nice pretty high-res flatbed scanner, and, of course, the automatic open/close printer output tray!! Haha that is so cool and awesome, it's going to be much smaller and less of a space hog compared to my old HP DeskJet.
Due to the magic of Amazon, I can order it now and have it show up when I get home which is just so cool. Hooray!! Looking forward to being able to print reasonable stuff at home again and having a scanner connected to my main computer is going to make things so much less annoying. Right now I've got to get out my old scanner and somehow attach it to my old laptop which is currently attached to my TV as a media center. Then I have to sit on the floor and use the wireless mouse on the TV to scan the images. Then I have to email them to myself so I can pick them up on my main computer. Definitely pretty bad workflow :) So the new printer/scanner is gonna be sweet, and the distinctly missing fax feature won't make me sad that I can't send a fax because I don't have a landline.
Sincerely, your favourite shopping/researching badass,
Jutan
Thanks for sharing this post, Jutan! I'm also a fan of the PIXMA series. It allows me to print anything, anywhere because of its sleek and compact design. And because its wireless, you don't have to worry about the plugging ins. And I must say that the quality of the prints is really amazing!
ReplyDeleteRoselia Mangione