8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Good little printer for quick print jobs, but not so great quality photos
Date of Review: Oct 3, 2007
The Bottom Line: This is a good printer, I would recommend it only if you don't want high quality photos.
I needed a small, inexpensive yet good quality printer for photos that I use as reference for my oil painting projects. I also wanted one that I could use to print out some decent photos for my family album, and preferably one whose ink doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Well, I found the Canon PIXMA iP1500 Printer on sale at Best Buy and thought I'd give it a try. It was small and inexpensive and I had heard it was a pretty good quality printer.
It has several different settings you can use with it: Photo paper, T-shirt transfer, High resolution paper, etc. And you can set the print quality to high, standard, draft, or custom. I usually stay within the standard range depending on how much detail I need for the photo I'm printing. I work as a portrait artist so my photos need to be in pretty good detail in order to use them to paint from. I am fairly pleased with the quality of photo that this printer prints. I did have a large Lexmark printer that was an all in one printer and the picture quality was excellent. But with this printer, the quality of photos seems to be a little faded and it tends to lighten the photo from what you originally see on your computer screen. The details are smoothed out and so the quality isn't all that great. If you put the setting to the higher resolutions, it takes a lot more ink and this printer seems to eat ink like crazy. Although, the photo quality is drastically increased. The upside to that is the ink is quite cheap. You can even go to some online discount ink retailers and find the ink as low as $2.50 per ink cartridge. And that is a big plus when you consider I was paying as much as $30.00 per ink cartridge with the old Lexmark I was using. That's just ridiculous. It prints rather slowly, but if you're a patient person, it won't matter. It hooks up to your computer by a simple USB cable, which is great. And that means it has plug and play compatibility which allows you to simply plug it in by the USB cable and you're off and printing.
This is a great printer if you're just printing out fun photos to show friends and family or documents from online, but not serious, detailed photos. All in all though, when you consider the pros and cons of this machine, I would recommend it for personal use and maybe for any college student that you know.
