Canon Pixma iP8500

But at £195, the iP8500 is still well within the grasp of serious home enthusiasts, and that's a market that should definitely be concerned with running costs.

The near-perfect quality of the iP8500 is achieved through Canon's eight ink tanks (complete with infuriating installation procedure), which continuously feed a permanent print head. This means there's an inevitable need for more frequent cleaning cycles, and like the iP5200 the iP8500 was cleaning itself well after a print job had finished. It also used a significant amount of ink each time we changed a cartridge - and with eight cartridges, it all adds up.

However, at just £5.42 each, Canon's ink cartridges aren't extortionately priced, and a best-case print yield of 163 prints is good if you take into account their price and small size. The overall efficiency rating of 58 per cent is good considering the technology used, although it does lower the print yield to just 95 pages.

It's the price of Canon's paper that lets it down, though. Around 25p per 6 x 4in print accounts for a significant portion of the final 44p total, and it prevents the iP8500 from climbing any higher in the cost-per-page stakes.

It can be argued, of course, that if you're shooting for high-quality prints, running costs fade into the background. This is true, but only to an extent. The HP 8450 offers marginally better quality, but besides being much cheaper to buy it also offers running costs just marginally lower than the iP8500's.