Canon's PIXMA IP1500 Printer

Canon makes some great home office supplies. Their printers are great and their scanners cant be beat. But even a great company is going to slip up sometime. Case in point, the PIXMA IP1500 is perhaps the most frustrating and poorly designed scanner that money can buy.

First off, its huge. Its way bigger then it needs to be. Not only is it big, its heavy. This wouldnt be a problem for someone who doesnt move their printer often, but bad news: you will always be moving this printer. Whether you have to mess with its temperamental ink cartridges or mess with the plug to try and restart it, you will never be able to use it without abusing it somehow. Its also difficult to tell what the buttons on the outside of it actually do. Even when you do figure that out, it may or may not listen to the buttons depending on how confused it is by your computer. And believe me, this machine is easily confused.

Its no better when its printing. Its capacity for paper is no more then about 5 sheets without jamming, which makes printing off long papers a real chore. Also, the printed documents actually fly all over the place. Even if you do manage to hold on to the document tray, your printed documents will still shoot out of the bottom of it like theyre trying to flee. And thats after the 10-15 minutes it will take trying to figure out how to print your document. At first I thought it was my computer, but other printers worked fine. Its just this printer, which would randomly decide to shut down jobs in the middle or take 20 minutes to print a 10 page document. Whoever designed how this printer communicates with the computer just did a terrible job.

The worst part of this is that the printer itself is prone to breaking. The printer cartridge carriage broke 2 times in the course of standard use, and the front cracked as well. I dont ask that a cheap printer survive a nuclear blast, but it isnt worth the time and effort to deal with a printer like that.

This printer is just a terrible waste of money. Maybe I just got a bad one, but either way, Id tell people to stay far away.