Like many other people I have used a variety of inkjet printers during my time. I now use inkjet printers in my office producing on average 50 colours pages a day. The two printers I will be comparing are the Canon IP4000 and the Epson R200/R300. The Epson R200 and R300 are identical in quality output the difference is in the user interface and features.The first printer I bought was the Epson R300. Compatible ink cartridges for this printer are the extremely cheap and the photo quality output is amazing. If you are simply after a printer for photos you can’t do wrong.However there are a few buts, the printer ink head does die, this means the life is printer is limited, in addition paper fed in does not always align correctly and it seems to clean the printer head an awful lot, wasting time and ink. I spent a lot of time cleaning the print heads, this became very frustrating.
It was due to these two frustrations I bought the Canon IP4000. The first thing you will noticed with the Canon printer is the speed, it is at least 1 and half times faster for colour printers, and 3 times faster for black text and this is really where I noticed the difference the black ink produces laser quality text, far superior to the Epson. The build of the canon printer is indeed much better with a replacement printer head if needed and two paper trays. Changing inks is also a much quicker job. The downside is that canon ink is a little bit more pricey but we are talking pennies/cents and the printer costs a little bit more, all in all I would recommend the Canon printer, for quality and performance.