Can someone tell me what they would recommend: HP or Canon?
As far as I know:
- HP because they have the best and most silent printers (in my
experience).
BUT...
- Canon have excellent printers as well AND have seperate ink tanks:
which most HP printers DON'T?
I was thinking of getting an Office Jet 6210 because it had an ADF.
HP offers seperate tanks as well on newer models, but I don't know of
one with an ADF that takes the #02 tanks.
I can speak about owning the mp760, and the mp780 to some degree. The
mp780 comes with fax, but no real advanced features other than you can
fax out from your PC, no real fax in from the scanner unit. The
springboard software from your PC proccesses multi-pages though
ez-photoprint, so unless you use the buttons on the printer, it's a
little annoying to do just a copy. I consider Canon to be young on the
multifuctional front. But the text output on the mp760/mp780 is
supurb, photos are great, and the cost per page reasonable. You can
still buy the mp780 for $220ish on amazon.com, but expect $300 for
their mp800 (no fax, no feeder)
The new mp830 (fax feeder) I know less about as i've never met one, and
I know very little about the mp800 (nofax). Cost per page for text is
still pretty reasonable, though slightly higher than prior generation
models due to chiped tanks with no obvious improvement.
While the mp800 comes in a wirelesss/network model, the mp830 near as I
can tell does not. I'm unaware if you can share the mp780 or mp830 on
a network and share the fax ability. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Hard to
say.
HP on the other hand, this is sort of their bag. They come with a
software suite while a tad bloated is a full blown solution, rather
than canon which pretty much offers just a printer, scanner, and fax
all in one package. While it's true most of the models which offer fax
and a doc feeder, if not all, use multi color tanks and head on the
cartridge, what you get with these suckers is volume... so there is
less opening of the cover. Not a big deal for some, but worth looking
at. HP does offer network models which often permit several pcs to fax
out from the same line, or most nifty share the scanner... something
which you could do in software but NOT a feature Windows comes with out
of the box, though it could if they wanted to.
The last HP I owned was the PSC 950. Fine machine... did it's job and
did it well. Not as cheap to operate as the prior generation that took
the HP45a cartridge, but that was my fault for not looking at the page
volume. The only reason I replaced it was the scanner started to
become flacky, as it turns out it was a software glitch and not the
usual discoloration of the alignment strip that I would expect, and the
canon multi-fuctions with the right tweeking print on CDs, not to speak
of refilling and cheap compatables.
Oddly enough, some of those tri-color tanks are not too shabby in the
terms of cost per page. Sure you always waste ink, typicaly cyan and
magenta, but you get a hell of alot of yellow out of them before you
chuck it. I dont' honestly know if i'd notice a difference between the
HP #97 cartridge and buying a set of three canon tanks.
