Cheap Home Printing

My $50 Canon printer scanner is pretty awesome for the price.  But when you print high saturation images, it just doesn't get the darks quite dark enough.  I realised I could overprint the image twice: once as a low contrast B&W layer, then over that the colour image.  It turned out really well, but I didn't compare it to just a single pass print because, hey, it's a cheap printer and I don't wanna lower it's return!