I had ok-to-bad experiences with HPs (admittedly this was years ago) and more recently horrible experiences with Lexmarks. My only contact with Epson (since dot-matrix) was my father's 777i, which was a nightmare, but my personal experience with it was minimal.
A couple years ago or so (don't remember exactly) I bought a Canon i450. It was, without a doubt, the best printer I have ever owned. It never gave me any problems, I mean that. This thing was great. Fast enough for me, good text quality, and evening amazing photo quality for the price. Don't get me wrong, this was by no means a good choice as a dedicated photo printer, but it will do the job in a pinch. It's plenty sharp, but the colors are not the greatest. Best of all, I was not using it that much; as you may know, ink tanks can dry out after about six months, and whatever ink you haven't used by then can soon be useless. The i450 uses small and cheap ink tanks: $6-8 for a black ink tank rated at 150 pages. That's small, but seriously cheap for a brand-name Canon ink tank made in Japan. Assuming you use the full ink tank on a more expensive HP or something, the per-page cost comes out to about the same, but with the i450 you have a better chance of getting what you pay for. Plus, paying less per cartridge can feel better. Buying a $30 cartridge for a $50 printer just feels wrong ...
Anyway, I was happy with it, but wanted to start printing more photos, so I decide to "upgrade" and gave the i450 to my brother. The new Canon iP4000 I bought to replace it is a whole other story ... I am still dealing with Canon on some problems with it, but that is a story for another thread. I'd tell it, but it still has to play itself out. In short, when it works the iP4000 is a great printer, but I haven't had the best of luck with it. To Canon's credit, they are working to address my issues.
The i450 has been replaced in the current Canon lineup by the $50 iP1500: it is a re-badged i450 with a fully-closing top door but no bottom tray. It used the same (by the specs / as far as I can tell) print head and ink tanks, so should perform the same. Also consider the $80 iP2000, which has the same ink tanks and print head, again, but adds more sophisticated paper handling options. Don't be mistaken, these are low-end inkjets, and I would not recommend them for even a "prosumer" level photo printer. But they should handle all of your text and occasional photo needs admirably and economically.
