Canon PIXMA iP1500 Photo Printer

Canon Pixma iP1500 is a great printer with very good design and features. First of all, the good thing about it is the price. For under $50 you get a nice printer that can give you photo quality and the ink is include. Just go grab yourself a cheap USB 2.0 printer cable from place like Walmart and you have gotten yourself a great economical home printing solution. One of the best thing about this printer is the actual design on the hardware. The paper loading tray of this printer can be folded down to double the use as a dust cover to cover up the place where the paper is inserted. It is a great feature to prolong the lifespan of the printer. For people like me that doesnt print a lot (a few times a month) it helps very much to have the dust guard. In many of my previous printers that doesnt come with a build in dust cover (not the plastic bag type), there were always dust building up at the paper inserting part and clogged up the paper roller and even the ink-head, which made all the print outs have lines across them. Thumb-ups to the designer in Canon who designed this features. The way its paper tray folded up also made this printer very space saving. In many of my older printers, I always have to lea ve room for the non-removable or unfoldable paper tray that stick out behind the printer. You dont need to worry about that with this printer. You can just put it at the corner of your desk right up against the wall. As far as print quality, it is superior for its class and price range. If you have a good sources photo, it is going to print out exactly like what it should look like on the computer screen. I would also recommend you use a high resolution source photo file to print if you want good print out quality. The higher the resolution (e.g. 1280 x 1024 dpi or 1600 x 1200 dpi), the better the print quality even the actually print out size is much smaller than what you want or what you see on your PC screen. Ink cartages for Canon has always been cheaper than most other brands. Same goes for this printer which use the BCI-24 type cartage which is the same or just slightly more expensive than the BCI-21 cartage found on most older Canon printer. Printer speed is good enough for my need and the noise it generates is perfectly acceptable. The only drawback of this printer is that it doesnt come with a seperate ink cartage and printhead container like many older Canon printer models did. Usually when I know I am not going to use the printer for quite a while (like taking a trip), I perfer to pull out the ink-head from the printer and store it away so that the ink-head will not clog up or dry out. I am not sure if Canon come up with new technology in this printer to prevent that problem or simply gotten lazy and omitted this feature. Or even worse that they simply perfer their customer to either print more, buy and use more ink to keep the ink-head functional or get new print-head from time to time. But thats just my personal conspiracy theory. I am going to find out about this issue later. I strongly recommend this printer to any casual computer user, students or even home and small business. You can never go wrong with Canon products. (HP printer always have mechanical problem and their ink cartages are expensive. The same goes for Epson and Lexmark printers even Epson have superior print quality and Lexmark printer only cost $30.) Note: If you want to get a cheap USB cable, go to Walmart. They have some really cheap USB 2.0 cables. I bought mine from there for around 8 dollars.

The printer was actually free after rebate with a desktop PC from Frys. I gave it 4 stars because while its great for the average Joe to print photos from the Canon Easy-Photoprint application, Im having a lot of issues getting it to print from any other application, i.e. Adobe Photoshop 7. Granted, Ive only used the drivers from the included cd, and havent spent a huge amount of time troubleshooting, but it ought to work out of the box. I also have a hard time with getting it to grab the paper after I load it. This may be an isolated problem, as Ive seen no other reviewer mention it. Regardless, its been quite handy to print last minute pictures for scrapbooking (when printing in bulk I use Snapfish). The pictures have been bright, clear, and scrapbook quality. For free, I really cant complain.

Nice printer, works fairly quicker than my previous Canon. Only downside, as other have pointed out, is the lack of catch tray. My old ink worked just fine for this one also, didnt even need to buy a differnt type.

I am using this lovely printer for about two months. It has given everything you would expect from a printer despite its affordable price so far. Color printing is almost lab quality. Quite fast, easy to handle and maintain. Rest assured, relatively cheaper cartridges wont be pain in the back unlike other expensive printers. Dont let them cheat you with the change only empty cartridge for each color lie. They always all become empty at the same time. As a result, you wont be sorry with this very cute and highly operable printer at all.

Fast and very good quality printer and it even works with Linux. It took me about 10 min to set up in Windows XP box and 15 min in Fedora Core 2 Linux box. If anybody wants a print driver for this, go to [...]

Exactly what I was looking for because I have a stackup on ink. I was happy to find this product, when i was striking out at the stores. I did not know it was an obsolete product. Thanks

This has got to be by far the best printer in its price range. Its fast, and prints with great quality. I used to own a Lexmark z23 printer. Which wasnt bad for printing papers for school or even a low res picture here and there. But when it comes time for an ink refil, youre better off buying another printer, which is what I did. The Canon iP1500 cost me less than getting a set of black and color refils would have for an outdated printer. Dont let the low price of this printer make you think it is sub-par in any way. I like the borderless printing option, it allows me to make perfectly sized DVD case inserts, as without the option I would normally end up with a 1/8 inch border along one edge. My major complains are the same as those already mentioned... USB cable (I already had one, so it wasnt really a big deal), No storage case for print head. The noise when it prepares to print and then several seconds after its done.

If you hate spending $35 or more on printer cartridges like I did, get this unit. I can get cartridges for about $2-$5 a pop and the print quality is great. I dont print pictures on it, but I did when I get it. Picture quality is ok(from what I can remember), but for doc printing its great!

The only reason I didnt give this 5 stars was because of the noise. Granted, its not loud enough to wake anybody up, but the start up and finish prep time of printing a document is a clunky noise. But besides that, the noise is worth it for such a great printer. For under $50 including the ink, it is a very good new product. I have just received it and printed not only some documents but pictures, and boy is it fast, neat, and all around a great print job. Highly recommended!

A local computer store was doing demos, took pic of my baby w canon A95 @ 3mp used the IP1500 and canon 4 x 6 glossy WOW! I checked out the price on Amazon Under $50, 50pcs of glossy 4x6 was under $8. The BCI-24 black is ~$8 and BCI-24 color ~$17. I have even tried some of the 3rd party knock-off inks (real cheap)and they look just as good. I can not find a flaw with this machine. I figured a ~$50 printer would have $30-$40 ink cartridges (Dell) but I have seen the BCI-24s everywhere and Canon paper is great quality and very reasonably priced. I am seriouly questioning ever visiting a photo lab again. If it were not for the demo I would have wrote this off as a cheap printer that produced poor quality prints. I think most all the reviews come to the same conclusion. I have extremely happy with the 4x6, 5x7 and 8x11.5 prints. I would not spend the time to write a review unless I really like or dislike a product, and my choice is obvious.