Yesterday, about 35 minutes before the closing bell rang on the sales floor, one of my co-workers (Micheal Wilson if you need to put a name to the mention) brought Mr. Jim Alkire, a friend of his to me for a little information and help on printers. His desire was a lab quality printer that would print up to 11×14. The Canon 9000 and 9500 immediately came to mind. The problem was we didn’t have any on hand and there is scuttlebutt that Mark II versions are soon to be shipping from Canon. Jim asked if there was a good Canon printer at the 8 1/2 by 11 size that might fill the bill. He also asked if he could print from his Canon Digital SLR camera or memory card, could his wife also print from her Olympus Digital point and shoot camera? I led him to the Canon printers and started to recommend the Pixma MP980 mutli-purpose printer that has built in card reader, document, print, slide and film scanning capabilities. He said that did much more that he needed his printer to do. Right next to that stack of printers was another stack of new Canon Pixma iP3600 printers. I said this a a very good inexpensive photo printer and has Pict Bridge input to direct print right from the both cameras.

“Do you have one on display?” He asked as time was winding down on the retail day. “No, but I can open this up and set it up if you would like a demonstration, ” I offered. Please was the response.

In under 15 minutes I had the printer, unboxed, the print head in and the chroma100 inks in and charging. While the inks were charging I gave a short tutorial on how to use the direct print features on the Rebel, and when the printer was ready we printed a shot straight out of Jims camera. He was duely impressed and I offered to grab another box and complete the transaction. He asked me to box up the one I demonstrated instead, which I gladly did. Then to our mutual surprise at the register we discovered this 100 year archival, photo qaulity household printer is currently on sale at Roberts for only $69.97. I figured twice that and he said that with the quality of the print he expected it to be 3 to 4 times more.

He and his wife left happy and I got out before the lights went off, well to be honest I turned them off on my way out, but I was happy that the sale, set-up, tutorial, printing and purchasing took only the 35 minutes avaiable. So was Jim. Before he left Jim asked me to let him know when the 9000 series Mark II printers come in.