Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had a hard time deciding whether to rank this little printer at four stars or five stars. I finally decided on five stars because even though the installation was a bit tricky, I ended up getting it set up perfectly and am very happy with it! It is worth the installation headaches! On elf my pet peeves is modern installation instructions! They are all line drawings with almost no words! I guess no one knows how to read any more. These are no exception. All they really cover, though is how to unpack the printer, install the print head and cartridges, plug it in and align the print head. To set it up for your computer or other device, you have to go to the canon website, and it is not a lot better as far as giving clear instructions. The difficulty with setting this printer up is that the different modes of operation require pressing and holding the WiFi button until the power switch flashes a certain number of times. It actually isn't very difficult, but is not well explained. A few more actual WORDS would help! What I had to do was to keep trying different things until I got things to work the way I wanted. I finally was able to link/install it to my wireless router so that it is available to computers on my network. Now works great with my old Windows Vista and Windows 7 netbook. I also have to iPads and wanted to use Airprint with them. I also set up the Canon printer app on the iPads which uses the network link. I can now print from any device with no problem! Problem is, I can't tell you exactly how I did it! Just be persistent! It's worth it! One other important point.... I did not use any cables for my installation. Everything was done wirelessly and via the internet. The only wire I used was the power cable. There is an optional (extra cost) battery available. I gave it a pretty good workout by printing up 50 Christmas Cards that I designed using a photo of one of my paintings. I had to do some experimenting and ended up printing on plain paper, card stock and on glossy photo paper. It handled all of these very nicely, but I ended up using the photo paper and printing on both sides, one side at a time. On huge photo side, I used the highest quality photo printing and it looks great! In doing the printing, I printed the equivalent of about 60 four by six high resolution, high quality, full color prints. It used about 60% of the color cartridge, so the capacity of the cartridge for photo printing should be about 100 4x6 prints. It used almost none of the black cartridge. This is a true photo quality printer with the added capability of printing general documents. Great flexibility. The color cartridge is cmyk four color for beautiful photo printing. It's a bit slow for general purpose office printing, but offers great portability! The black cartridges cost about $18 to $20 for the Canon brand and $6 to $10 for "compatible" brands. Color are $19 to $22 for Canon and $7 to $16 for "compatible" brands. This means that even with the Canon brand cartridge, I got 50 beautiful custom Christmas cards for roughly $30 including the cost of photo paper. One feature I think is a great idea is the replaceable print head. I think this is a good compromise between having the print head built into the cartridge and having a hard to replace print head in the printer itself. This is a very flexible, powerful, mobile printer. A bit expensive initially and tricky to install, but well worth it! I'm very pleased with it.