A few weeks back I bought the Canon Prixma iP4500 and I am really liking it. Since receiving the printer I have been using it nearly everyday for several weeks and none of the ink tanks have had to be replaced. This was a pretty big deal for me.

In a printer I was looking for a cheap unit that would produce decent color prints, but would also print lots of black pages without needed new ink every week. So far this printer has been great.

Using regular 20lb paper the color output is not good, a lot of the prints get a little blurry as the paper soaks up the ink dots. However when using photo paper, or just higher quality smooth paper the image quality is excellent.

As I mentioned before the printer has been able to print many black and white sheets without needed a refill. This is mainly due to the fact that the printer has a separate pigment black ink reservoir that is much larger than the other tanks and just prints black.

The only down side to this printer is the lack of a CMYK driver. Seeing as the printer uses CMYK inks I was hoping that it would allow me to directly print in CMYK. However the driver is RGB only so it converts all prints to RGB then reproduces using the CMYK inks. This seems a little odd to me, but the prints produces are still good, just not as accurate as I would like with regard to CMYK documents.

Overall though for the price I would recommend the printer, due to it's relatively low cost, good print quality, and good price per page.