Digital Home Thoughts: Canon Announces Two New PIXMA Printers: The MP560 & MP490

"For the consumer who wants and needs to have a printer that can print, copy and scan, the new Canon PIXMA Photo AIO Printers provide all this and more. The new PIXMA MP560 Wireless2 Photo AIO Printer is the most compact Canon inkjet printer to have both wireless capabilities and built-in Auto Duplex Printing. This new AIO Printer, the successor to the popular PIXMA MP620 Wireless Photo AIO Printer, also is the first Canon PIXMA Printer to have the ability to print out pictures directly from a USB Flash Memory device3. With a new sleek design, the PIXMA MP560 Photo AIO Printer features five individual ink tanks with the ChromaLife100+ ink system providing more vibrant and longer-lasting photos. The PIXMA MP560 printer can print out a photo-lab quality borderless 4"x 6" in approximately 39 seconds6. The 5.1-centimetre LCD screen and integrated Easy-Scroll Wheel allow for easy navigation through menus and viewing images. Under the new ISO print speed standard, the PIXMA MP560 AIO Photo Printer will deliver output at approximately 9.2 ipm for black-and-white documents and approximately 6.0 ipm for colour4. The estimated retail price of the PIXMA MP560 Photo AIO Printer is $169.995."

First the printer: looks nice. Canon printers have always been nice and fast, and produce high-quality prints. The fact that you get built-in auto-duplex printing and wireless connectivity for $169 CAD is impressive. If you need a good all-around printer, one of these two new printers look like a safe bet. Now for a tangent: Canon has a problem.

The problem is that Canon has too many products that are similar, and it's difficult to tell them apart. Looking at their product page, I count 18 inkjet printers - oh wait, that's just their inkjet multifunction printers. Once you add in the 12 photo printers, you end up with an astonishing 30 different inkjet printers. Why on earth would a company need to offer 30 different printers to customers? Can the printer market possibly have that many segments? Epson is no better, offering a dizzying 27 different printers, and I imagine HP is about the same. Do printer companies really think that having a different printer for every $20 bill they have in their pocket? I wrote about this issue back in 2008 in an article entitled Too Many Minds, and everything I said there applies here.