A good printer that has the extra rear load feature
934263
Love this printer because I do a lot of cardstock and photos and I need a printer that has a rear load feature.
447328
The first thing that  you notice about this printer is its shear size. It is not merely big; it is huge. It is actually bigger than and as heavy as my old workhorse Laserjet II. Since the late eighties printers have been lighter and smaller every year. In this sense the 8850 is a throwback to  an era of over-engineering. Given that the Laserjet II lasted in my law office for seventeen years, over-engineering is not necessarily a bad thing.

But comparing this printer to any other photo printer is not fair to the other printers. This thing is called a Photosmart Pro for one very good reason. It produces large professional quality prints. This is not a printer for your 4 by 6 inch snapshots on your 3.2 MP point and shoot. It is a printer that takes full advantage of professional and semi-professional DSLR cameras such as the&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Canon-Digital-Rebel-XTi-10-1MP-Digital-SLR-Camera-with-EF-S-18-55mm-f-3-5-5-6-Lens-Black/dp/B000I1ZWRC/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Canon Digital Rebel XTi 10.1MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 Lens (Black)</a>, or&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Nikon-D3-12-1MP-FX-Digital-SLR-Camera-Body-Only/dp/B000VRV6LY/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Nikon D3 12.1MP FX Digital SLR Camera (Body Only)</a>&nbsp;or my own&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Nikon-D80-10-2MP-Digital-SLR-Camera-Body-only/dp/B000HGMX5M/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Nikon D80 10.2MP Digital SLR Camera (Body only)</a>.

It is also a printer for your best work only. There are plenty of other printers which can make decent 8 by 10 inch prints. HP makes many of them. I have a&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/HP-Photosmart-C7180-All-in-One-Printer-Fax-Scanner-and-Copier/dp/B000GWNQS0/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">HP Photosmart C7180 All-in-One Printer, Fax, Scanner, and Copier</a>, an All In One that is pretty good. But pretty good is not always enough. Thes prints are 4800 dpi which is very close to the type of quality big solid ink commercial printers costing much much more deliver.

As to its size (it's like having a Volkswagen in your office)...It needs to be big to handle 13x19 inch prints. Those are the kind of prints you frame and hang on walls or sell at art shows. And understand that you will not get cheap cost per print. The ink cartridges are expensive and there are eight of them, along with four print heads. These are high capacity cartridges put the truth in the printer business is that the printer exists as a vehicle to sell ink.

For serious amateurs this is an affordable but not inexpensive printing solution.
4276156
I purchased this printer to replace an old HP printer which I was very happy with, but the ink is no longer available and there's no Windows 7 driver to do automatic double-sided printing. Also I liked the idea of wireless and of having the copy and scan functions as well as printing. Fax would have been nice but since I don't have a landline phone it probably wouldn't work very well anyway.

Setup went very smoothly, and I used WPS to connect it to my router and never had to use the USB connection at all. I only installed the drivers, the scan utility, the on-screen manual, My Printer, and the network and scanner selection tools. The install could have been a little more informative and told me the printer had successfully connected to my router, but it's a minor point.

The text and images I've printed look great, the test image I scanned looked great, and the test copy I made looked similarly great both in color and black and white. So far I've used only plain paper so I can't speak to quality of images printed on photo paper. Automatic double-sided printing worked well.

My only real complaint is that the paper trays are flimsy - I have cats, and when I'm not using the printer I leave the paper output tray closed and the paper stop thingie folded in so they won't step on them and possibly break them. Speaking of, the paper stop thing is kind of clumsy - it rotates way out and can't be shortened. But it really isn't needed unless you're printing multiple sheets so I leave it folded in.

It may sound silly to focus on appearance but this printer looks really beautiful - glossy black and with the paper trays both closed it becomes a compact and classy-looking box. It's got a pretty small footprint for an all-in-one and that's a big plus in my limited space.

Edit 12/6/2012:
I've removed one star from my rating because the printer has major paperfeed problems. Every time I use it I have to manually push the paper in or the printer won't grab it. I've tried cleaning it but that doesn't help.
551733
I've used the printer for a couple months.  It is much quieter (startup, running and idle), faster, and more reliable than an earlier model Brother I replaced.  The colors for pictures are good, though I have not tried special paper.  Scanning, printing, faxing, and copying all work well.  I've only printed double sided but intend to try double sided scanning.  The starter Paperport application makes scanning easy.  The menu system is easy to use.  I am very pleased with this printer.
1046832
I have this printer now for a couple of years and I am very happy with it.  It prints quickly with nice quality and reliably via the wifi.  The ink cartridges have a pretty good life span-wish they were a little longer as they are pricey.  It does everything that is says it would do.  I also use the pdf function that works well.  It is rather large so you need a fairly good sizes spot for it to reside. The tray flips out of the printed paper to be caught while printing so you need and extra 10 inches or so in the front.  It can be kind of hard to find the paper refill as it is flush and at the very bottom.
1762067
We've had a three-in-one printer for some time now that has slowly but surely gotten worse. It's gotten cranky, squeaky, and loud. When this printer showed up on Vine we leaped at the chance to replace it. Our expectations were pretty low -- the Pixma feels cheap.  I didn't even know my wife was installing it until she told me, but to my surprise my laptop had found and installed it without even notifying me. Score one for the new guy.

Unfortunately, the Pixma comes with starter printer cartridges, which is a bit like a demo version of the printer. The costs of a printer really are the print cartridges and it shows in this approach. It also at first seemed like there was no means of holding the paper -- out of the box, the paper feed juts out of the front of it, and the paper output flops over -- but it turns out there's a little handle you swivel out that props up the paper.  It feels flimsy and is a curious design decision (seriously, they couldn't just extend the front of the printer to support 8" by 11" paper?).

The interface is simple and straightforward. This is a good thing if all you want to do is print or scan, but not so much if you want to mess with the printer at its console -- you're much better off doing it from a computer or a mobile device.  This printer does not have an auto-feeder or a memory card slot or a rear paper tray.

The Pixma does a few other neat things that are worth noting.  For one, it has a quiet mode. My old Canon got so squeaky that...well, I replaced it with the Pixma, so you can imagine how annoying that is.  The Pixma can be quieter, which is great since it's right next to my wife's desk. It also has an eco-mode which is adjustable. This is a great feature if you're eco-conscious like we are. Finally, the Pixma is basically its own mini-computer since it sits on the wireless server, and it cleverly downloaded and updated its own firmware.

Pixma's primary advantage is its mobile access. There are a host of disclaimers, listed on this Amazon page. Read them carefully before you buy, because you may not be able to live with all the choices.  One big one is that while Pixma does print from mobile devices, it requires an app to do so -- there's no magic print button on every app. The app instantly found the printer and set itself up which was great. Not so great: printing documents requires some acrobatics, so at least on iOS pictures are really the only "one click" printing solutions for a printer like this. When I went to click "document print" it found nothing, and there's no help file to identify what counts as a "document" on my very busy iPhone.

This is a good first printer and a great gift for someone who only needs to print the occasional document. The mobile accessibility is great but the tradeoff is that the printer is very narrowly focused. If you're a writer and tabletop gamer like me who tends to punish printers by printing large volumes of paper, you might want to look for a higher end printer.  But if you just want to do the occasional print without a lot of fuss, Pixma is a great budget-priced printer.  It's not a workhorse printer, but for most printing needs it should do nicely.
3288716
The Canon PIXMA MG2220 produces very good output.  As a non-printophile (Is that a word?  It is now.), I would even call it outstanding output.  I suppose that, as with all things, there will be those out there who have incredibly high standards and that such people may think this printer to be just OK.  I'm a home user, needing mostly text output, and this printer does a an exceptionally fine job of that.  The color photocopying is so good I mistook a copy for the original.  Photocopying is as easy as can be, with one button.  Just lay the original on the glass, close the cover, press the button.  Done and done.

The graphics output is pretty good.  I bought some DVDs with no cases and was able to find insert graphics for them online.  When printed, I (a non-printophile, remember) found them virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.  I was impressed.

I haven't had much of a chance to do scanning.  I did scan one item, but it's not a fair test -- the original is a lithograph, so the dotty nature of the image comes through in the scan, when the image is seen onscreen.

I like the paper tray, I think it's a clever design.  It folds out of the way when you don't need it (a plus in my cramped computer room), but keeps my docs off the floor when they come out.

The software includes a useful ink indicator by which you can tell how much ink you have left in your tanks.  I like that -- no more surprises.

On the down side, my print jobs have been mostly high-quality output, and this machine is blowing through ink at a monstrous rate.  I haven't been counting pages, so I can't be sure of this number, but I don't think I've printed twenty high-q pages and my ink tanks are already down to 1/3 full.  To be fair, Canon included only the low-capacity tanks with the printer, and there are higher-capacity tanks available.  I'll buy the PG 240XXL black tank and the CL-241XL color tank, which are the highest-capacity tanks Canon makes for this model.

A big minus: the Onscreen Manual leaves a lot to be desired.  As near as I can make out, it appears to me that either the printer or its software have undergone changes.  A lot of the information seems to relate to software I don't appear to have and as such, I'm seeing instructions instructing me to do things I still can't figure out how to do.  I still can't figure out how to use the Canon software to print.  Word-processing documents are no problem; you print those from the word processor's menu, which is the Microsoft-standard menu on (most) PC-compatible software.  Likewise when printing a graphic from a separate application.  But when using the Canon software to try to print images, the manual makes cryptic references to software I don't think I have.  I suspect Canon may have revised the software but not the manual.  I don't really have the technical savvy to be able to figure out how to navigate the dark and frightening thickets of my computer and its hard drive to try to figure out what's going on with the software mystery, which leaves me...kinda stuck.  Somewhere around here I do have a CD-ROM with an old graphics package I used to like, and maybe I'll load that and use it for my graphics printing.  Again, as a non-printophile, it'll do for me.

All in all, a good printer which produces completely serviceable output.  Unfortunately the documentation leaves a lot to be desired.
4871654
I've had the unit for a few months now.  Printer output is excellent, the scanner and scanner driver good, and color copies are excellent.

I do have a couple of quibbles.  Each successive Canon printer I've owned has had successively smaller ink tanks.  I know printer makers sell the units at low prices and make their money on ink.  Canon has taken it a little too far with the 220/221 cartridges.  Black holds 10ml of ink and the colors 4ml.  Color photo prints are cheaper to send out due to ink costs.  Meritline often has the 220/221 sets on their daily specials for $15 for two sets and they work fine for graphics and text.  You have to buy the grey separately, but Meritline carries them at a reasonable cost.

Another option is to refill with good ink.  I've had good luck with MIS over the years and their Chromalife compatible makes good photo prints.  I doubt the prints will last as long in a brightly lit room as the original ink, but I can just reprint if they fade.

The other issue is the two sided printing.  It is painfully slow when everything works.  There is a long pause between printing one side and pulling the page back to print the other.  That wouldn't be much of a problem if you could just start it printing and do something else.  The unit has a bad habit of picking up an extra sheet then stopping to give you a message that the paper isn't compatible with two sided printing.  It does this with both the cassette and tray.  I fan the paper, square it and make sure the paper in the cartridge is offset at the proper angle.  I use standard 20# copy paper.  When you remove the paper and OK it doesn't reprint that page, which is a pretty poor design IMO.  I recently printed 20 copies of a 12 page color newsletter and it was a hassle to go through and print the missing pages separately.  It will collate and print back to front.

I don't regret the purchase as it is a good unit.  Next time I have a large print job I will just print the odd pages then turn everything over and print the even pages rather than mess with two sided printing.  It will go a lot faster and picking up two pages will not be a big hassle.  Otherwise it works fine if you don't mind buying ink tanks often.
3817889
PROS:  Easy installation (via USB cable), paper drawer, fast print speed, low cost.

CONS:  Form feed is only 1 page at a time and the form is sometimes misfed which resulted in the print being slanted.  This form feed also caused some jamming.  Printer cartridge is also a bit pricey.

OVERALL:  Great printer for low volume printing that does not need much form feeding (print on envelope).
2456746
I needed a printer with the air print feature for iphone and ipad. This turned out to be a very good printer which produced beautiful prints - both images and regular everyday printing. I like that it prints easily from the iphone if I need to print an email or two on the run.

The printer set-up was pretty easy. You can download the software either via the enclosed cd or online. Printer comes with all of the ink cartridges (I believe full capacity and not starter cartridges). Everything else was fairly intuitive.  Printer did not come with a USB cable, by the way, and I feel fairly neutral about that but others may want that bit of information.

Photo quality was very good even on glossy paper. Scanning was so so - a little slower than I'd like but acceptable. Also included is a card slot and a large paper tray (250 page capacity). The printer has excellent envelope and special printing capability via a rear feed function. Two sided printing was excellent and fairly quick. Had a few issues with the alignment on documents but that may need adjusting I haven't quite figured out yet - could be an issue with the paper tray or how I've loaded the paper.

Otherwise, a very good printer, lightweight, and good looking.
450471
This printer is a bit larger than some other All in Ones but not Monmouth Just something to consider if you have a tight space.
I really like the template feature that allows you to print checklists calendars staff and graph paper right from the printer console.
The software that comes with the printer is a lot - I just wanted a printer and uninstalled some of the add-ons after a week or so
The cloud printing and networked printing does not seem as easy or as seamless as my epson printer.
I can usually print from my phone and PC where I installed printer drivers but other laptops are not able to print shows printer as offline.
The print Quality is good and it is a bit faster than my Epson all in one and there are 2 black cartridges all +
Bottom Line: Bigger footprint, Nice features, Networking/Cloud printing issues, Good Print Quality and speed
1173613
The five ink cartridge system, the resolution, and the memory card slot are the best features of this printer.  The separate color ink cartridges keeps me from throwing away tri-color cartridges with unused ink.  The high resolution makes high-density photos and snappy prints.  The card slot in conjunction with the versatile Canon photo printing software makes printing new photos easier than ever.

Setup went well in the Windows 7 machine - the problems were all in the XP computers.  None of the problems involved the printer or its software.

I'm pleased with the printer and look forward to years of fine service.  The PSC it replaced lasted 12 years.
4828605
I would give this printer five stars, but sometimes it sleeps so deeply that it doesn't react when called upon.  This problem may actually be a network problem, but I never have this problem with any of the other devices connected to my network, even the wireless devices.
The ink isn't all that expensive, considering the price of ink for some of the other printers in this price range.  It has multiple cartridges for the different colors and black.  The black cartridge is twice the size of the other cartridges, which is a good thing since most document printing is done in black and white.
Overall though, it is a good printer.  It has printed everything I've needed it to.  Probably the best part is the ability to print from our wireless devices.  This is a good feature considering the amount  of computing done from my tablet these days.
I haven't used the fax function yet, as it is pretty much a dying technology,  but it's nice to know you've got it in case you need it.
954681
I am not totally happy with the printer but it does get the job done. It is extreme load, it's load as it starts up, while its printing, and even after its finished. Lack of external ports to load and print from a portable drive.
3506294
I've had this printer for a long time now and we've had no problems.  It's got a nice design and goes into power-save mode when not in use.  WiFi is a great option - no need to locate it near the computer any more.  Use it for scanning too all the time.
2265671
HP clearly bills this as a business class printer, but intensive home users might want to give it a look as well.  Despite the higher initial price, the HP PageWide Pro 552dw color printer gives you an overall better build quality, faster printouts, lower long-term consumables cost, and, critically, plenty of connectivity and compatibility options to help ensure that printing will be a non-issue for you well into the future.  That said, this is advertised primarily as a business printer in environments where the minimum monthly print volume is 1000 pages.

Let's face it, we're all printing less than before.  This means that we want a printer that will "just work" on the few times that we do it over a longer time frame.  For this reason, an investment into this printer is not a bad idea.  The quality of the printed output is superb - i tried it side by side with my old panasonic laser printer (b/w) and this HP actually looked better by a wide margin.  As i undrerstand it, this printer tries to upscale the print quality to 1200x1200 (black and white) or even 2400x1200 color.

You can connect to it via standard ethernet, via USB (both "in" and "out" - meaning that you can either connect a USB cable from your PC or you can plug in a USB flash drive with your documents on it) or via wifi (802.11 b/g/n).  Wifi range is fine.

YES this is a duplex printer (it can print both sides).

The ink cartriges are individual so that you replace only the colors that run out.  Like with many printers, this comes with a low capacity cartridge (3500 pages for black) though you can buy a 10000 page black refill and even a 17000 page extra capacity unit.

Amazingly, despite all these printing features, this is a not-as-heavy-as-it-might seem 37 pounds and also supposedly is energy efficient with a number of low power standby modes.

Cables are not included.
808860
A very good printer, scanner, fax machine...simple to install.....