My trusty Brother HL-1240 laser printer has lasted over eight years, and it still works fairly well. That's longer than I've known my wife. I love the crisp look of laser, and its 250 sheet paper cassette is very handy. Ultimately, my only real complaint is that it blows a raunchy toner-smelling air into the room while it prints, and causes the lights to dim. But its occasional PostScript hiccups (resulting in dozens of lost pages and frustrating re-prints) and incompatibility with my Airport Extreme have finally compelled me to look for another printer.

Having considered this move several times in the past year, I didn't take long to decide on the Canon PIXMA iP4000 Photo Printer. (CNet review.) It's fast, it's inexpensive, the print quality is good, and it has an excellent combination of features. Some of my favorite features are ones I didn't realize it had when I bought it, such as the two paper sources (manual feed and paper cassette) and quiet print mode.

My favorite feature: automatic two-sided printing. It prints one side, then sucks the page back in and leans the print head up to print on the other side. With my Brother, I had to draw a little diagram and tape it to the side to remind me how to stick odd-numbered pages into the paper cassette to do double-sided prints, and I would still get it wrong. Canon, I love you.

The iP3000 and the iP4000 have about a $50 price difference, and I admit my motivation to go for the iP4000 was purely because the store (I bought it from a store!) didn't have a 3000 in stock. The 3000 prints in four colors: cyan, yellow, magenta and black. The 4000 boasts five colors. I tried to get the salesman (I talked to a salesman!) to tell me if the print quality is noticably better with five colors, and he said he assumed so, but didn't have a print sample to illustrate. When I got it home, I discovered that the 4000's five colors are cyan, yellow, magenta, black, and... black. The fifth "color" is another black cartridge. The CNet review clarifies: the three colors and one black are dye-based (for photos), the remaining black is pigment-based (for text). Knowing this after the fact, I consider this worth the extra $50 for the iP 4000, but I feel silly having sprung for the higher model for lesser reasons.

Another note about the advertised features, and my apparent gullibility when it comes to product descriptions: The feature list says "up to 25 ppm black, 17 ppm color." When I read that, I said, out loud, "Really? An inkjet printer can do 25 ppm?" It sure can—if the pages are blank. It feeds quickly, that's nice, and the black print head is extra large so it can print in fewer passes since the last inkjet printer I've used—which must have been an HP DeskJet 500, given how new I apparently am to all this. But this Canon will never be any faster than my old 12 ppm (regardless of page contents) Brother laser printer in practice. CNet clocks the Canon at 6.69 ppm for text in their testing (4 ppm to 5 ppm on average), and describes this as "brisk". It is, compared to other inkjets.

Also: Borderless photo printing on 4" x 6" photo paper. And, it can keep a stack of 4" x 6" photo paper in its paper cassette.

I like the iP 4000, and will enjoy having a color inkjet as my primary printer. But as a writer (I'm a writer!) and a lover of type, the fuzziness of inkjet'ed text already makes me pine for my eight-year-old laser printer. Maybe I'll keep little Bro around, just for old times' sake.