I bought an Epson Stylus CX5500 a few months ago, and took it to college with me- I needed something cheap to print my assignments out on, and also to do some general printing. So far it's mostly been a pleasure to use. Although I use it mostly for printing out letters and assignments I've also printed off a few photos on it, and for such a cheap machine it's done very well.
The ink comes in four different cartridges (black, cyan, magenta and yellow) which suits me fine, because I use mostly black ink, so I can just change the cartridge which is running low. It's easy to change the cartridges and I've found the initial setup and maintenance of the printer to be a breeze. The drivers have worked fine with my laptop (I'm using Windows Vista) even though I disconnect and reconnect the printer all the time. In general the print quality has been very good as well, with all the text I've printed being clear and crisp. The photos I've printed have fairly good quality as well. Not as good as a more expensive machine, obviously, but fine for my purposes.
Now for the downsides. It is a very large printer. You'd want to have a lot of desk space to store it, and to be honest I tend to just pile things on top of it because it takes up so much of my desk. It's also really quite loud. This might not be a concern for many people, but when I'm printing assignments late at night in an otherwise quiet house, let me tell you, you really notice it!
As for the technical side of things, Epson uses pigment based inks which won't run when you highlight them or if they get splashed with water. There's also an adjustable slide so you can feed different sizes of paper though, and of course the multifunction side of things- this printer is also a scanner and copier. I've found the copier attachment to be especially helpful- if I miss a lecture and need to get a copy of a friend's notes I can just run off a copy then return them quickly.
I'd recommend this printer for anyone who wants a cheap starter model printer. If you're going to be doing hundreds of pages of text based printing, buy a laser printer, if you want to print photos buy a photo specific machine, but if you want something which can do a bit of everything then you could do a lot worse than the CX5500.
Epson Stylus CX5500 at Mis_nomer
Epson Stylus CX5500 at TestSeek
