Earlier in November 2010, I had written about requirements for a new printer that I was planning to buy. At the time a $250 Brother laser printer seemed to hit the mark. However, after a bit more research, I decided to go with a $50 Canon Inkjet. I had wanted my new printer to be space efficient, wireless accessible and fast with both printing and scanning. The Canon Pixma MP495 meets all these requirements. At ~12in x 15in x 6in, the printer is quite small, occupying less than a third of the space that my (separate) printer and scanner occupied before. The MP495 comes with built-in wifi, and while one needs to faithfully follow the manual in setting up the wifi connection, the setup is not terribly complex.
Printer speed at ~9 pages/minute for black and white is adequate for my use case of printing the occasional document at home. The scanner is pretty speedy too with a wireless initiated scan taking ~20 seconds: much faster than my old scanner which would take ~60 seconds for a single scan.
Black and white print quality is pretty good, but not as good as the laser printer I replaced - not an unexpected result ofcourse. On the plus side, the new printer can do color - not a deal maker for my use case, but since I have been shooting more photos lately, this feature might actually see some use from me. Apparently, one can even print to the printer from a smart-phone - I haven't tried this yet but I can see myself printing documents in a hurry directly from the phone. Again, not a deal maker, but pretty nifty.
There are a couple of things that the printer could do better, but doing so would probably require space or cost compromises. For example, the scanner tray won't take a legal sized paper. And there isn't an autofeeder for the scanner on this machine (although there is one on the $140 PIXMA MX870). Neither is a deal breaker - I expect that I will only occasionally struggle with legal paper scans or more than ~2 pages worth of scans at a time.
Overall, a nice and complete home use package for a very acceptable price. And 1/5th the cost of what I was contemplating in November. We'll see if the package holds up under actual use.
Note: A good friend recommended the Epson Workforce 610 which he managed to get refurbished for $40. A new price of $140 (Amazon) seemed a bit steep compared to the Canon MP495, so I went with the latter.
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