Check Out What All Canon PIXMA iP1900 Colour Inkjet Printer Has To Offer

Canon PIXMA iP1900 is a very reasonable inkjet that may have some of the bells and whistles of more pricey machines, but it can produce plain text pages, colour graphics and more than sufficient glossy photos, with hardly any issues.

The iP1900 is decked out entirely in black plastic, though, apart from two front corner panels, they don't shine like a Steinway. For anyone trying to take a photo of this printer, that's a good news. However, the determinedly matte black case looks somehow purposeful, in comparison with more fashionable shiny plastic machines.

The rear paper tray of Canon IP1900 ink folds down over the front cover, completing the practical lines of this giant lozenge-shaped printer. There is no output tray and paper feeds in its place directly onto the desktop. This can be quite disadvantageous if you don't have a deep enough desk to hold the sheets. There are only two control buttons, both with inset green leds, one for power and the other for paper feed and to cure jams.

At the back is a two-core mains socket and at the side, slightly awkward, is a USB socket. Overall, the printer takes up astoundingly little space on the desktop, mainly when compared with other Canon inkjet printers.

There are two united inks and printhead cartridges that clip into a head carrier within the iP1900. One uses a pigmented black ink and the other holds cyan, magenta, and yellow dye-based inks. Boat slip into place, but require to be pushed upwards to click into their holders that can be a slightly tricky until you get the hang of it.

In a gesture for the tight budget that must have prescribed the design of this printer, there is no automatic head placement, but instead, you have to print out an alignment sheet and feed in offset figures to get the two heads working precisely as one.

The standard suite of Canon support software comes along with the printer and this comprises Easy-PhotoPrint EX, which handles nearly all of the standard kinds of print you might want to create, with a more than half-decent CD and DVD labeling program. While this printer has no features that allow direct disc printing, it will print onto disc labels quite blissfully. Also, there is not the option for editing images within PhotoPrint EX.

The cartridges for this machine are accessible in two capacities and, as usual, we used the higher capacity to generate the most inexpensive figures. We calculate costs of 2.57p for ISO black pages and 5.43p for corresponding colour ones.

The cost of each black print is exactly the same that costs with the PIXMA iP4600, while we use Canon CL 38 cartridges, and relatively higher from machines like the HP OfficeJet Pro K5400n, but not too bad for a basic-level machine like this. The colour cost is approximately 0.7p lower than with the PIXMA iP4600 and is quite good for this category of printer.

Verdict

The PIXMA iP1900 is great value for money product. For a printer costing lower than a meal out for two, it develops very great quality prints in both black and colour and doesn't cost the earth to do it. While you might miss attributes such as production tray and being able to print on CDs and DVDs, as a basic personal ink-jet workhorse, you couldn't ask for a lot more.