For the price of an ink cartridge

I can't believe that no one has reviewed this all-in-one machine yet! It's been this holiday season's deal of choice for most major retailers. I've seen it given away for free with a computer purchase, or priced too low to pass by. Well the Friday after Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days of the year - not because I like going in all the madness, but I still love getting the newspaper and looking through the deals. Every year I get something just for the tradition. This year my present to myself was this Canon MP160.

It was advertised at Best Best buy at the unbeatable price of $19.99 and there was no sales tax this weekend. My Epson printer is almost out of ink, and with 6 individual cartridges to be replaced it will cost me over $50 to replace those. So I figured for the price of just one cartridge I could get a whole new all-in-one.

Of course Best Buy is the worst place to be on Black Friday, but I bravely armed myself with the newspaper ad and popped into the neighborhood Staples, which carries the same model, but at a considerably higher price ($69). I showed them the ad and asked them if they would match the price, they were very reluctant and were pretty much looking for any excuse not to do it - finally they said they just don't match rebates, and it was advertised as an instant rebate, but they said NO! I didn't get discouraged and hopped straight into the Office Depot next door. They looked at the ad, said "wow", honored the lower advertised price, and thanked me for the purchase. Lesson learned: Staples - BAD, Office Depot - GOOD!

Honestly, I didn't really care about the multi functionality, I never had much of a need for a scanner, and usually make copies at my office. I was very surprised when I found myself scanning and copying all the time. What I wanted was just a cheap printer, with cheap ink for simple text printing, so I can preserve the ink in my Epson printer for one reason only - CD/DVD labeling. I had had experience with Canon printers before and the price of the ink was unbeatable - $6 for the black cartridge and about 12 for the color. This one is not quite as cheap - each one costs about 20, but that's still much better than replacing 6. I am sick of buying a new printer every time I run out of ink, I just wish they'd just start selling the ink at a reasonable price.

Usually I try to completely bypass the software that comes with printers, because they tend to load way too much junk on your computer, but being a multi function model I was worried that I wouldn't get the whole functionality if I only loaded the drivers. I am really glad I did. I didn't have any problems installing the printer on my computer, but because of the incredible price I recommended it to couple of friends of mine, one of them had an older computer with XP service pack 1, and he had to upgrade to SP2 before the printer would work.

After installing the drivers and software the printer prompted me to align the heads, which turned out to be perfectly fine without me having to do anything. The whole process took less than 15 minutes, and that includes the unpacking. The machine looks rather large although it's not excessively heavy. As always the USB cable is not included.

As I said I was very glad I decided to install the full software. This is by far the easiest and most attractive printer software I have used, that came for free with a printer. I especially like the scanning software, which offers a couple of surprising and excellent features: picture-to-text software, which allows you to convert text from scanned pages into text format that can be edited in a word processor; the other feature is the ability to save documents in the PDF format for free! Needless to say at this price I didn't expect to see anything like that.

The printing software offers some cool features too, like optimization for photos (red eye removal, simple editing, etc), and a special tool bar for printing from the web to optimize the site to fit well on a page. As far as photos go I still fill more comfortable with XPs printing management, and Fireworks for editing, but I have to say the included software is very user friendly.

The down side is as usual, the software forces itself in the start up folder and wants to start with windows boot up, so I had to go and block the auto start. I see no reason for it, because it will slow down the boot up times, and it is really very easy to start any of the applications. There are several easy buttons on the control panel on the machine - one to scan, one to select the paper size, two to increase/decrease fonts, to separate copy buttons - for color or black/white copying, a cancel button, and a service button. There is also a small numeric display that shows the state of the machine. Pressing the scan button brings up the scanning software, which proceeds in the form of a wizard that guides you through the process and allows you to select the best settings for the particular job. It really makes scanning very easy, and non-intimidating, something that I really appreciated.

I particularly liked the ability to make copies without having to plug in my computer to the machine - just insert the page to be copied, press either color or black copy and that's it, copying is very fast and efficient, and the quality of the copies is amazing.

I don't have any complaints about the printing quality either, except the start up routine, which seems excessively long, but this seems to be typical for ink jet printers. The thing I am worried about though is long term reliability. I was extremely happy with my previous Canon printer at the beginning, but less than a year later it started needing maintenance every time I would try to print something. I used to waste a lot of ink with cleaning and deep cleaning of the nozzles. Eventually it started just eating ink in one or two print jobs. I really hope this doesn't happen with this model. I try to print out something at leas once a week now to keep the nozzles from clogging up.

For $20 it's almost a sin to even look for cons, but I have to honestly say it is hard to come up with any even when I try. If I have to be really picky I'd say that I found the document alignment on the scanning/copying glass reversed - usually I am used to putting the sheet to the far left on the glass where is this model I have to put it to the far right, but once I got used to it, it really doesn't matter. I already mentioned the long start up routine. I guess it would've been nice to have a separate loading tray for picture size paper, maybe a CD/DVD printing tray, and some memory car slots for direct picture printing, but then it would've been perfect, and such products just don't exist.

Really, for $20 I don't even care if this printer only lasts 6 months, usually that's the time I'd run out of ink anyway and that usually means buying a new printer. Hopefully the ink won't run out till next Black Friday so I can get a new one!