The setup was straight-forward and the included software was good for organizing and printing photos. As expected, no USB cable was included. It weighs about 13 pounds and it has a fairly large footprint - 12 1/4" x 16 1/2".

Once it was installed, I printed a couple of 4-megapixel digital color photos that looked as good as or better than the same photos that I had developed at a Ofoto. For the test, I used Canon's 4x6 Photo Paper Pro ($9 for a pack of 20.) The prints took less than a minute at the highest resolution from the time the paper loaded to the time it finished.

Paper handling is good. The standard paper tray holds a thick stack of 8.5" x 11" paper. There is also an attachment that holds a stack of 4" x 6" photo paper. The attachment and standard paper tray remain in the printer together. When you want to print in the 4" x 6" paper, you just turn a dial and the printer feeds photo paper. Turn the dial in the opposite direction and the standard paper tray is selected. I had a little trouble with the mechanism that engages and disengages the 4"x6" paper feeder. I would have to jiggle it when I turned the selection dial in order for it to work.

The printer was very noisy when loading paper. It sounded like the whole thing was going to erupt. I thought I must have mis-assembled it. But once the paper was loaded, printing was quiet and fast.

My next task was to print some photos I had taken at an outdoor summer party in Connecticut. The setting was surrounded by green trees, grass and shrubs. These were 4-megapixel digital color shots and I used the same Photo Paper Pro. This time, the results were disappointing. The greens were completely oversaturated and far too yellowish. I tried printing one of these photos on a Canon i960 and it looked much better, so I have to blame the i860. I cleaned the print heads and tried printing some of these shots again with no better results.

A couple of weeks later, I needed to print some full-color real estate listing sheets. I used plain Canon Matte photo paper ($10 for a pack of 50) and printed lower resolution than I had with the photos. Again, the prints were very good. Exceptional, even. I printed more than 100 8x11 sheets and didn't run out of any of the 5 color cartridges. Quite impressive. These prints took only about 20 seconds as only about 30% of the page was taken up with color images and the rest was text.

Next I printed some 4x6 black-and-whites that I had scanned from negatives. I tried a couple of different papers this time: HP and Kodak. Neither produced results nearly as good as those that I printed on Canon paper. There was a fair amount of banding using the Kodak paper and the HP paper seemed to have bumps on the printed surface.

By this time two of the ink tanks were empty. I felt that I got a great deal of mileage out of the tanks and I was glad that I only had to replace two colors rather than a single tank that contained all colors. Changing the ink cartridges was a snap - literally. They pop in and out very easily. I spent $12 for each of the tanks.

After a couple more weeks of printing various sizes photos and business material, I decided to return the printer. I was seeing the over-saturated greens too often and that was unacceptable.