CANONi865 - CanonIX4000 - CANON9950

Hi,

my girlfriend is a young designer and used for years an A4-Epson stylus photo printer (don't ask me which one, I forgot) and was very happy of the results. The quality is tremendous, unless the fact the printer is slow and the cartridges are expensive.

now she needed a3 printer and we went buying the canon ix4000 for 300€. The price seemed to be attractive and the reviews where all good. We thought it would be a good deal and as we made some tests back home, it appeared to be awful ! The colours didn't come out, you couldn't have personalised printing (where you can change the printing speed and so on) and when I compared some pictures with what my CANONi865 produced it was really bad.

I don't understand why the CANON IX4000 couldn't be as good as my smalll CANONi865 I bought 2 years ago for a merely 100€. We tried a test A4 with 12 different pictures and with the Canon IX4000 you clearly saw the pixels and the colours were horrible. We used the exactly the same program to print it (Windows fax viewer) , with everything the same, and still the result was bad. After that we tried all differents kinds of paper and adjustments, but it went worser and worser. My girlfriend wasn't happy that she couldn't adjust the printing speed and other things like you could do it with her Epson.

Was it normal that the Canon IX4000 gave such poor results ? And the Canon i865 gave such good results ? Anyone had the same experience ?

So now we are looking for a more expensive a3 photo-printer (around 600€) and are wondering wether we should choose for the Canon 9950 or the Epson R1800. Can someone give me the pros and contras, knowing we print text on photos (mostly colour photos, so we don't need the Epson R2400) ?

Thanks for responding !