[jeffc]

Interesting. I prefer HP printers to all others, but I got a Canon with my last PC (it was cheaper to go with the package than to just buy the PC, monitor and an HP printer).
The Canon is a good all-in-one scanner/copier/printer (ink-jet) - quiet, fast, good quality "photos" (the pictures really drink ink, tho, LOL).
Anyway, getting update drivers is no problem, no spam, etc. (I send spam to the Junk Email Folder in Outlook). Haven't seen anything from Canon except for notifications to holiday-themed DL's that my wife likes to look at and sometimes actually DL and use.

I'd still rather have an HP printer with the multiple print cartidges for photos . . .

[Still Thinking]

Well, the part I was afraid of with a driver from HP wasn’t so much emails and so on, as bloated software to clog up the PC and suck up CPU cycles when about all it’s good for is to sell ink cartridges (and maybe phone home, who knows).

There’s also a good trick for splitting out the driver from the crapware if they don’t offer them separately. Install the driver, including crapware on a PC you don’t care about, then share the printer. When you set up another PC on the network to use the shared printer, Windows will give you the choice of using the copy of the driver on the PC where the printer is shared, or copying it to the local machine. If you choose to copy it, Windows copies only the driver, sans crapware. Then you can blow it off the machine (real or virtual) where you first installed it.