Here is my take on printers:
HP inkjets are crap! I say that because after having to deal with well over 100 customers that come to me compaining that their HP deskjet XXX does not pick up the paper correctly, it has made a "slight" bad impression on me.
NO COMPLAINTS ABOUT THEIR LASER PRINTERS THOUGH!!! They are wonderful and highly backwards compatabile.
Epsons are wonderful and fairly reliable. I do recommend them and they have excellent photo/color printing quality, even in draft mode.
Canons are a mixed bag. My first printer was a Canon 200ex and that thing would NOT die. I even had to fish some bobby pins out of the paper feeder one time and it ran like a champ for years (still to this day that was the best printer I have ever owned) Their color printers seem to have too many problems when it comes to the ink heads dying on you and you have to spend $50-$200 to replace them.
Lexmarks I am not really fond of either. I got a Z32 for free from my mom when she could not get it to work and all I had to do was replace the ink tanks. I have never been able to get it to network print correctly and the ink dries up too quickly (but then again I only print once in a blue moon)
If I ever get another printer, I am going to bite the bullet and get a small sized laser printer, probably from HP. Ink just dries up too much on my and I am tired of having to deal with all the crap that inkjets give me. It is worth my time and money to invest in, say the HP LaserJet 1200.
My .002cents