The only issue was that having never owned a printer, I didn't have much brand awareness. Sure - there's only Epson, Lexmark, HP, Canon, Brother etc. to choose from. Still, I had 2 criteria which could potentially narrow the field down - WiFi and AIO (All In One for the not so geeky).
But here's the interesting bit - I first went to John Lewis' site to see what they stocked, found a couple of printers which fit the bill, checked the cheapest online prices which turned out to be Amazon's. Why John Lewis? For the same reason that Dixons chose them as one of their three targets in their remarkable ad campaign (see below) encouraging customers to get their info somewhere else and place the order with Dixons.
If you are interested - the story's here.
As coincidence would have it, while I was doing all this research, BBC2 informed me that the next scheduled programme was "Inside John Lewis" - the synopsis for which was "In a television first, the BBC goes behind the scenes of John Lewis - one of Britain's biggest and best known department stores - as it tackles changing tastes, tougher competition and the worst recession for 80 years. Programme three looks to the future. John Lewis is expanding its fashion offering online and we learn what their customers are expecting from a brave new world of 21st-century shopping. The big question facing John Lewis is whether they can embrace this online world without compromising on what it considers to be the business's Holy Grail - personal and specialist service."
Personal and specialist service. Not so personal on their website sure, but still specialist and specialist enough. The point is that these retailers expend the effort in reducing the available choices out there (edit it, in their own words) to a manageable few that we mere humans with mortal coils and limited time, resources, knowledge and patience can make an informed choice from. That's pretty special, but not special enough - thank you JL for the free advice but 30 quid extra is a lot to pay for a machine selling at 115 quid on Amazon!
But I rationalise my obnoxious behaviour thus - JL was only part 1 of the search phase viz. to create a list of 2 maybe 3 printers to research further and more importantly obtain reviews and feedback for. Reading a pc magazine's reviews on the choices, customer reviews on amazon and apple (coz I need the printer to work with mac and windows) narrowed the list down to one - Canon PIXMA MP560 (despite the problems some people have reported setting these up with routers of different makes and security settings and snow leopard).
Then, and I can't for my life remember how and why, I decided to check how old this model was and recent developments in the Canon PIXMA world, when I came across the news that Canon announced 3 new wifi AIO printers with added faxing ability in Feb (available end of March 2010) - the MX870, MX350 and the MX340, the 340 being an "entry" level at 99 quid RRP (89.84 on Amazon pre-order). Story here. So for those that need a fax machine, here you go.
I was almost back where I started - confused and having to choose. Which is where Canon's product comparator came in handy. Pretty much told me that for my non-facsimilated needs, the MP560 was the dog's proverbials.
And that's what is winging its way to me.
Update: 25 Mar 2010
BTW - Don't let the spiel on the new Canon printers with regards to iPhone printing fool you. You can print from your iPhone/iPod Touch direct to the MP560 too. Yep - there's an app for that!
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