Excellent workhorse all-in-one for home office

I bought the MP600 to replace an HP 2000C which had served me very well for 8 years, but was jamming a lot so had to go. After doing a lot of research online, I decided to go with the Canon MP600 because I saw that it was highly rated and did everything I needed. I purchased it online from Tiger Direct in July 2007 for $109, after rebate. It was a breeze to install.

Printing quality is every bit as good as my old HP 2000C and a lot faster too. Haven't had a single paper jam in 7 months with 3500 sheets of paper and a lot of envelopes! Wow! But the big plus for me is using it also as a copier. My big old 12 year-old Canon copier was finally dying on me, and with much reduced copying needs, this multi-purpose printer meets my copying needs just fine - except for legal or larger paper sizes.

I've only printed photos on regular paper so far, with OK results. Obviously, I need to switch paper to photo stock to get really good quality, which so far I haven't needed. My work with the MP600 has been 90% text, a lot of it multi-colored, and for that the results have been excellent. Prints fine on card stock too.

I rarely use the scanner, because I still have an HP scanner-only unit that seems to do a better job with multi-page documents. So far, the MP600 seems to want to put each scanned page in a separate document, but that may be because I haven't bothered to read the manual to learn how to do this(assuming it's possible), because I'm already set up with the HP scanner. Obviously, I really just wanted this machine to be my printer and copier (both B&W and color), for which it gets an A.

Does it use a lot of ink? Yup! But it seems that selling ink is the REAL business all printer manufacturers are in these days. In my home office, I go through about 500 sheets of paper per month. In the 7 months I've had it, the MP600 has gone through 2 1/2 sets of color ink cartridges and about 5 text-ink black ink cartridges (there is another black ink cartridge especially for photos, and I'm just now replacing that - haven't printed many photos). So, yeah, I've spent as much on ink in 7 months as the cost of the printer.

However, I have bought ink refill-kits on line that are about 1/4 the cost of the manufacturer's ink. And I've had no difficulties using the refill ink on my printer, except that it is a real nuisance doing the refilling. The most difficult task there is using a corkscrew-like device (supplied in the ink kit) to remove a small plastic ball from the cartridge in order to inject the ink. That little ball can be a bear to pull out of its socket. Takes about 15 minutes to refill a cartridge whenever one gives out.

Be forewarned that if you do this refilling, never try to reopen the cartridge's refill port to inject a bit more ink until the cartridge is completely empty again - because reopening it breaks the slight amount of suction needed to prevent the ink from suddenly flowing out the bottom all over everything.

Incidentally, the refill kit is intended to give you 2 refills per kit - one kit for text-black, and one kit for the three color cartridges. (No refill kit seems to be available for the photo-black ink.) Another problem with the refill kits - for me anyway - is that I keep procrastinating ordering them online until I'm out of ink (I guess because I hate doing the refilling in spite of the big savings). Not the printer's fault - it gives plenty of advanced warning before a cartridge runs out of ink.

I highly recommend this all-in-one printer.