Result!
Well, since so many of you kindly gave me their opinions, I decided to acquire a Canon Pixma iP4700. It has now been in use for several weeks with its third party refillable cartridges and I am impressed. The unit is compact, has two different paper paths, one for bog standard A4 for ordinary printing and another for photo paper and card where the paper does not get bent through 180 degrees in the printing process. Colour photo prints, using third party ink (Black, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow only) are spectacular.
A few days later, not wanting to be left out, my wife spotted a Brother MFC 6490CW multifunction unit on offer for less than £200 in Staples. Third party ink cartridges are not expensive for this unit, it sends faxes and has wireless facilities as well as printing A3 sheets if necessary and as the cartridges are unchipped, the printer cannot tell that third party ink is flowing through its print heads! I am also impressed with this unit, particularly as wife has managed to send a fax on it without help from me, but haven't tried it on photo printing yet. If it is as good as my Canon in this respect, then it is worth a recommendation, particularly as Brother don't appear to be as keen in rooking the printing public with ink prices!
Somewhere up in my loft is a Brother 18 pin dot matrix unit that I used to use in the late 80's and early 90's before the ink jet got invented. I certainly had no complaints with that unit.
P.P.