Canon i560 review

Impressive speed, quality prints and low running costs - that's what we said about Canon's i550 inkjet, our current Best Buy printer. Its successor, the i560, has quite some reputation to live up to.

It made a good start the moment we took it out of the box. Where i550 was ugly, the i560's two-tone case borders on trendy. Beyond the cosmetic, not much has changed. Both printers use separate cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink tanks. Even though its printers only use four inks, Canon claims they can produce pictures equal in quality to six-ink models, as the printers produce super-tiny dots. Both machines can also hold 150 sheets of plain paper in their trays, which fold away when the machine isn't in use.

One new feature is the fact that you can hook up your digital camera to the i560 and print directly. This is handy - but it only works with Canon cameras. It can also print pictures up to A4 in size without borders.

Installing the i560 was a breeze. The driver software, manual and Easy-PhotoPrint application required only a few mouse clicks to load.

I fired up Easy-PhotoPrint and chose to print a 6x4in photo. Again, just a couple of clicks were needed and 50 seconds later I had a borderless picture. When printing draft text, the i560 is also a speed demon - we clocked it at 17.4 pages per minute.

Quality was respectable - and certainly on a par with the i550. Colours were occasionally too vivid, making skin tones slightly too red, skies too blue and grass too green. Generally, though, the photos compared well with conventional prints. My only gripe was that the paper feed left a slight dent on the prints.

Author: Jim Martin