Excellent choice - Not - update

When I needed to replace my 2 yr old deceased A3 printer I spent one and a half days surfing online reviews and tech specs. Apart from quality of print and long lasting colour, I was looking for a robust printer that could handle heavyweight papers with a flat pass through, and was neither wasteful of ink nor print time. This printer offered this on screen so, although more than I usually spend on a printer, I hit the order button and the next morning it arrived.

It was very easy to install on both my PC and Mac. Its separate ink tanks for each colour must be more cost effective than combined colour cartridges, and it's quieter than the other brands I've had before. It's taken a 250gsm A3 sheet through the top sheet feeder without any effort at all (the front feed taking stock up to 1.2mm). I set it up to print a high quality photo print and got up to go and make some tea while it got on with it - before I'd reached the door it was done - the quality outstanding. I have no regrets at the extra outlay as it meets all my requirements and looks solidly built to last long enough for the savings on ink cartridges to pay the difference - apart from that you're paying for a quality printer which I can recommend.

Update 19/06/08 - since submitting this glowing review 3 months ago I have returned the item and received a full refund! It suddenly stopped working, showing error 5110. Canon sent a technician who applied some grease and it worked for a while then recently repeated the same problem - when I returned it. The first breakdown happened at a weekend when there is no Canon technical support available and, on trying to resolve it, I found other people on the internet had the same problem. I may be mad but I have just ordered a Canon Pixma Pro9500 - where they have sorted this problem out (I hope) - but it is even more expensive and unfortunately the ink cartridges I had purchased for the Pro9000 will not fit it!

The best home printer I have ever had!

I work at home and have struggled with printers in the past but this one really works for me. I can only go on my own experiences but this does it all.
I do a little bit of design and because of that I have high standards and as this faxes, prints, scans and copies all in colour; it has saved on the little trips to the local printers. I am yet to have a problem with it. It comes with loads of additional features that I haven't really gotten round to using yet but the more gadgets the better in my opinion.

Worked straight out of the box...

I was very pleased with this printer.[...]

This machine worked straight out of the box. The only hiccup was having to download the Windows 64-bit drivers from the website, but I was anticipating that and had downloaded them in advance.

The print quality is excellent - the ability to produce A3 size photo prints to frame is why I bought this in the first place, and I have not been disappointed.

An excellent printer at a reasonable price.

Good value printer but some colour issues...

This is good value printer. Yes, it is a big printer but you expect that as its a scanner and copier too. The installment software is very good and clear so you are up and running in no time at all. The prints are produced quickly and are very crisp on regular paper (i have not tried to do photoprint paper versions yet.) but i have one minor gripe so far on the print quality: the definition within dark or shadowed areas is not good. The picture on the monitor shows a good range of colours and visible shapes within the shadows but when you print, the pictures have just dark shadows and all the subtlety in the photo image is lost. This is with the print quality on standard and the color/intensity on auto so there might be the facility to change it, i'll look into it.
On the whole a good value printer and mostly good quality too.

Works Great Under Linux

I bought this printer for it's compatability with Linux, and while initially I had troubles using it under Fedora Core 6 (x86_64), I found a cure to get round it at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=214189 . I tried it with a few other flavours of Linux including Suse 10.1 (x86_64), Ubuntu, and Knoppix and it worked straight away. Simply download the latest version of the driver from the Samsung website, and follow the instructions. The scanner also works fine and the copier does not even require a computer.
The print quality is fantastic for my purpouses (student) and it's speed is very good for the price. It comes with a starter toner cartridge but no USB lead.
Under Windows, it installed fine and comes with some extra software for scanning, editing etc., but no-one really cares about that, it's all about the Linux, Baby!

Gives fantastic results, but a few niggles too

Mono and full colour output from this 10-pigment printer are gorgeous and it is a wonderful gift for more advanced amateur photographers - the sort who are already using Adobe Photoshop etc - if they have enough space for a unit that's 66cm (26 inches) wide.

Ink is expensive and relatively hard to find. Unlike the CLI-8 cartidges for the Pro 9000, there's no multi-pigment PGI-9 pack for this machine. I'm paying £11.74 per cartridge (inc VAT) which means refilling all 10 tanks is about £125 including delivery. Coverage isn't great so it can be expensive to run. Colour fidelity (e.g. flesh tones) can drift significantly when cartridges are low rather than empty, so you have to be ready to change cartridges the first time you see a warning rather than waiting for the 'empty' message. Stock up on extra black and grey cartridges if you like to print in mono.

Canon paper (not easy to find in shops) has a bewildering classification system. For example, Canon says 'Photo Paper Pro' is their 'flagship professional photo paper', but this paper isn't supported by the 9500's bundled 'Easy PhotoPrint Pro' plug-in for Photoshop, and in fact is not recommended for the Pro 9500, though it is for the 8-colour Pro 9000. The difference between SG-101 and SG-201 papers is hard to understand, etc. You can work all this out by diligent web searches - the trick is not to buy a lot of expensive paper until you have worked out exactly what you want.

Bottom line: a 5-star piece of equipment slightly let down by the complexity of keeping it stocked with ink and appropriate paper.

SPP 2020 for 6 * 4 photos

I bought this printer fairly recently as my wife does a lot of scrapbooking with these size photos. The quality is very good. More than happy with it and for £15.00 it is extremely good value. If you want to edit photos you either need to buy the SPP 2040 as a stand alone or use the SPP 2020 with a PC. Overall this printer offers reasonable value for money but you need to watch how many you print. Prices for the cartridges vary a lot so shop around.

Has a Design Fault - Don't buy it!!!!

I ordered 2 officejet pro K5400dn for work. After setting up the first one, and testing it, even on the first day, it kept chewing up the paper as the print carriage was catching it when using double sided printing (duplexing), so sent it back and got a replacement.

The second one seemed to work fine except for the odd chewing of paper when double sided printing but then after 3 weeks, did it everytime - so sent this one back also.

The first replacement worked fine for the most part for about 4 weeks and then starting chewing again so sent it back with the second replacement which I didn't bother taking out of the box.

This is why I would not recommend this printer at all.

Pleae note that I did not purchase the printer from Amazon but PC World Business (or Equanet as they are otherwise known) - so this is not a bad reflection on Amazon.