My new Canon PIXMA IP1800 replaces my Canon PIXMA IP1600 so the planet may be doomed and It could be my fault.

The ink is running out on my old printer and, bizarrely, new cartridges would cost more than a brand new one. My wife was furious.

'The ink costs more than a new printer? That's ridiculous! I'm offended as an environmentalist and....'

Let's leave her in full flow and take a short walk to where her voice is merely a soft roar in the distance and consider the logic beneath her rant. She's right you know. It flies in the face of the government's current enthusiasm for saving the planet from global warming for customers to be encouraged in this way to throw away their perfectly good Canon PIXMA IP1600s just to save money.

Printers have come on a lot since the rotating bonky wheel on the old Amstrad 8512 and 9512 PCW machines, and the grating whirring of the dot-matrix models of old. In performance terms my own layman's opinion is that you now get fabulous text and pictures out of modern printers so quality - unless you have very particular and discerning professional needs and eyes a lot better than my old eyes - isn't a major question. As my son would say, 'It's all good.'

Technical things like: "4,800x1,200dpi" don't mean a lot to me. That's how many dots per inch it can do. A photo looks like a photo - that's all that matters for my purposes. A review I was looking at just now thought it was quite a slow printer. It takes a couple of minutes for an A4 print of a picture. Is that a long time? I'm not a newspaper or a magazine publisher on a deadline. I used to take my Brownie to the chemist and they took days to print my tiny, blurred, monochrome snaps. I can live with two minutes for a clear-as-a-bell A4 colour picture, thanks very much.

Although the death of the planet may be hastened by the weird pricing policies I've outlined here that make us into wanton and evil consumers, the good news is that this range of printers is super value. A budget printer like this would have been £80 easily five years ago. Now you can get one for around £26.50. That's good news for consumers though not so great for the survival of life on the planet. In fact, the ink for Canon printers hasn't gone up significantly in price. It just hasn't matched the falling price of the machines.

Still, be aware that an infrequently used printer can be destroyed by the use of cheap alternative ink. It can dry in the print head causing streaking in printouts. I've had it happen and even though I bought a special cleaner cartridge, nothing helped. Some printers have cartridges with a print head built into them but in the Canon IP range they're fitted into the machine and cost too much to be worth replacing.