I should say up front that I’m not a huge printer user or fan. Don’t misunderstand, they’re useful and over the last decade have come on the the point where they offer fantastic value and quality output, but somewhere, somehow I just don’t have much interest in them.

However, I do own one. An Epson PM-G820 in fact. We bought it three years ago to print our wedding invites since the quality was great and that, along with some great invite papers we found represented a far, far, far better deal than getting them printed ‘professionally’, a conversation that will escalate into a rant rather quickly.

That all said, last week, the printer started producing weird lines and generally colourful messes where I was expecting a family photo. I wasted spent 5,000 yen on more ink as ours was low and I thought that might be an issue. I pumped that through the print head at astonishing speed in the guise of ‘nozzle cleaning’ to no real avail. In the end, I decided to junk it.

In it’s place, we’ve bought the Pixus iP4500 from Canon for 15,000 yen. So far, it’s been great – photos look fantastic on default settings (on photo paper) and generally it does what I want, but importantly, it does what my significant other wants – prints maps, recipes and photos of our daughter for relatives.

After only one night of use I’d say the software is simpler than the Epson and the defaults are more useful. I haven’t tried the CD/DVD label printing, but if that can at least match the Epson’s that’d be nice too. On the hardware side, it’s well built, not quite as good maybe, but still good, a fairly small footprint, a very cool two tray paper system which is useful, a snap-in print head (unlike the Epson’s hardwired one) and whacky LEDs on the ink cartridges.

This is all the more better that this new printer is 10,000 yen cheaper than the PM-G820 was. This is also my first Canon printer, having owned two Epsons previously, the one before the PM-G820 being when I was at university, which sort of shows how often I don’t own printers.