Suggestion on Canon or HP printer

I am currently having a Epson printer (3 years old) and I decided to buy another.

I occasionally use my printer. In this case, according to several sites, I should avoid Canon and other brands because the machine made a clean header to each ignition to prevent drying of the ink, and therefore it consumes ink.

Therefore I'm thinking of to buy HP or Lexmark printer, which have their print heads into the cartridge. Yet Canon make me want!

Hence my question:
- Some of you who are equipped with Canon can tell me that whether they have faced the drying ink on the head?
- The ink cartridges they wear out quickly?
- The use of 5 cartridges rather than individual 2 (colors and NB) is it an advantage?

I am using Canon printer since 1 year and never faced drying issues, provided you print a color page once every 15 days as a precaution.

HP and Lexmark are not given the heads and integrated cartridges are expensive.

In a client on a Lexmark cartridges, 3 colors are of Rs. 2520, almost the price of a multifunction cartridges of Canon.

Even for occasional use, I get the best performance / price / cost for use with my Canon printer which is a very good scanner and is able to print photos very beautiful. Frankly I see no better than this.

I have a HP retired printer, which uses cartridges 339 (NB) and 344 (color) with heads incorporated. I have this cartridges since May 2007 and I print pages per month and some photos. Never had any problems. It is still functioning properly.

Canon is not good at all because you must turn on the printer from time to time. However for the waste of ink for each ignition, it is a harsh reality. This is surprising that with equal amount of ink, HP prints more pages than all its competitors. But as HP ink is very expensive, the cost of use remains high.

Thank you for answers, I hesitate again because I really does not use the printer very often and I'm afraid to forget to print a page every 15 days to prevent the heads dry.

I just brought a HP Deskjet F4185 AiO from Notebook City like 4 months ago and the thing is it was (and still is) only $NZ83 - which is the reason why I brought it. Yes the printing companies will sell their printers lower than they're worth (sometimes at least) and they gain the money back from the ongoing ink cartridges (it's the same model that XBox and PS3 and other consoles go by, they get their money back via the games).

But anyway the website if you're interested in cheap printers is at www.notebookcity.co.nz. They've been around for about a year I think and has a big customerbase already. Worth looking into.