It’s an open secret that companies that make and sell printers don’t make money off of the printers themselves – no, the real cash is in the inks that you use. Unfortunately, printer inks are pretty damn expensive – some have even said that it costs twice as much as human blood. It’s no surprise though, that a lot of pinoys go down the remanufactured or the CIS (continuous ink system) route in an effort to spare themselves from the bite of high printer ink prices. Well, Canon has heard your cries for lower prices for their inks and have released the Pixma E500 – an affordable multi-function printer that uses affordable inks.
The Pixma E500 is your typical multi-function printer styled in a nice, gloss black finish. The real draw of the E500, like we mentioned before, is the price of its inks – Php 595 for black and 695 for color which Canon says should last you up to 1,200 pages (for the set). The E500 also has a couple of other nice features – PC-less photo enhancement via the Auto Photo Fix II, filter effects and D.C.G. processing technology.
Probably the real question here is if the Pixma E500 will be able to compete with its other low-ink cost competitors – HP has already had a couple of printers that uses low cost ink (and several models are able to take XL tanks) and EPSON has recently announced their own ink-tank printers (in an effort to compete with CIS systems that utilize their hardware, no doubt) that offer ridiculously low cost per page. Canon, for their part, is confident that the Pixma E500 will be able to stand out in the market, simply because the printer doesn’t just deliver low cost prints – the E500 is also capable of delivering top quality photo prints, something that other low cost printers typically struggle at.
To entice users to buy the E500, Canon is giving away a Rudy Project watch and a running armband that’s collectively worth Php 4,300
The new Canon Pixma E500 will retail for Php 4,495.