Cheap Printers

Canon Pixma iP4820 prints impressive photos for the price

Look closely at printer reviews, and the Canon Pixma iP4820 quickly emerges as the best choice for the home user on a budget -- one who wants to print vibrant photos and clear text, without spending $300 on a printer.

"The Canon Pixma iP4820 color inkjet printer does just about everything well, does it fairly quickly, and does it quietly," says PC World, where it's one of the site's top five inkjet printers. It's also a favorite among owners at Amazon.com, who -- like several experts -- are wowed by its sharp, vivid photos.

"All of the photos in my tests easily qualified as true photo quality," says veteran printer reviewer M. David Stone at PCMag.com. "I'd peg them at a notch above what I'd expect from a typical drugstore photo, although not quite a match for a professional photo lab or much more expensive photo printers aimed at professional photographers." What's more, black and white photos also looked great in his tests.

Some reviews recommend the HP Officejet 6000 Wireless (*Est. $80) instead, for its somewhat less expensive ink cartridges and ability to print wirelessly over a home network. But even these sources say the Canon iP4820 prints faster, prettier photos than the HP printer. And many users complain that HP's cheaper ink tanks don't last as long as they should -- in fact, Hewlett-Packard settled a class-action lawsuit about its short-lived ink refills in late 2010 (see more on the HP Officejet 6000 Wireless in our best printers section).

Replacing all five of the Canon printer's black and color ink tanks costs about $65, about $15 more than replacing the inks for the HP Officejet 6000 Wireless printer. Although some users at Amazon.com complain that the ink costs too much or that the nozzles clog if you don't print often (a common failing of inkjet printers), most say the Canon printer uses ink at a reasonable pace. One user says he printed "a whole batch of wedding invitations, RSVP cards, full-color maps to the wedding venue, envelopes and glossy envelope seals" and the included ink tanks were still half full.

Like the HP Officejet 6000 Wireless printer, the Canon Pixma iP4820 is Energy Star-compliant and includes an automatic duplexer, so you can print on both sides of the paper without having to manually flip the paper over to print the second side. This Canon printer has two paper trays that hold 150 sheets each; reviews point out that it's convenient to keep plain paper in one and photo paper in the other.

Text-printing speeds are roughly comparable to the HP printer's; the Canon inkjet printer ranges from six to 10 pages per minute in tests. The Canon inkjet blows past the HP when it comes to photo printing, though, cranking out a 4-by-6-inch snapshot in about a minute, and an 8-by-10-inch photo in between one and two minutes in tests.

Unlike the HP printer, the Canon iP4820 can print directly from your PictBridge-compatible camera, camcorder or phone, although you'll need to buy your own cable. The Pixma iP4820 can't print directly from a memory card or flash drive, though, and it doesn't have an LCD preview screen like some pricier photo printers.

HP Deskjet 1000: Best ultra-cheap printer

Reviews indicate that the cheapest inkjet printers generally require sacrifices in quality (particularly photo quality), speed and paper capacity. Several reviewers also struggle with recommending inkjet printers that sell for $50 and under -- on ethical grounds. When a pair of replacement ink cartridges cost as much or more than the printer itself, then for all practical purposes, the printer is disposable. With computer products already consuming too much space in landfills, such disposable printers can exacerbate the problem.

Still, the HP Deskjet 1000 (*Est. $30) impresses the reliable experts at TrustedReviews.com and PrinterInfo.com. It's one of the cheapest printers you can buy, but testers say the HP Deskjet 1000 does a surprisingly decent job of printing photos and black-and-white text. HP has pretty well stripped this printer of any extra features -- for example, it doesn't include the USB cable you'll need to hook it up to your computer. However, it does come with a carrying bag, and at about 4 and a half pounds, this lightweight (some users say flimsy-feeling) printer folds up small enough to be somewhat portable (about 17 inches by 8 inches by 5 inches).

It's not fast: Testers at PrinterInfo.com and TrustedReviews.com manage only six to eight pages per minute in lowest-quality draft mode and about two and a half pages per minute in normal mode. Snapshot print times range from about one minute to about three and a half minutes in tests, depending on the quality you choose, and all photos have a white border around them -- the Deskjet 1000 can't do borderless printing. If you're going to print more than the occasional snapshot, experts say the Canon Pixma iP4820 (*Est. $80) (discussed above) delivers much faster, higher-quality photos.

You'll pay $35 to replace both the black and color ink cartridges in the HP Deskjet 1000 printer -- more than the cost of the printer with the ink cartridges included, making this in effect a disposable printer. Experts and users say the ink doesn't last terribly long, although this new HP model was not named in the class-action lawsuit that HP settled in 2010 over claims about the high ink consumption of its printers.