Canon Bubble Jet i865 review

A top-notch photo printer, the Canon i865 is versatile enough to take plenty of other jobs in its stride. Text quality is almost as good as a that of a laser printer.

The i865 is pretty big for an inkjet. On the up side, though, it feels solid, chunky and robust. But it does have some slightly awkward design features. The USB and parallel ports are at the top of the back of the printer, so the connection cable is always visible. The power and paper feed buttons are large and feel a little clumsy, and the photo paper attachment makes the printer look like a piece of industrial machinery. Otherwise, the design of the i865 is impressive, and the input and output trays fold neatly away.

Getting this printer up and running is more complicated than we'd have liked. First of all, the print head is separate from the ink cartridges, which is good as a means of saving costs, as the print head needs to be replaced much less frequently than the ink. What it does mean, though, is that the head needs to be installed first, followed by the five separate ink cartridges. Before you can continue, you then need to align the print heads using the i865's driver software. This is relatively straightforward, but a bit fiddly and time-consuming.

Having said that, once up and running, the printer driver is fully-featured but uncomplicated.

Considering this printer is mainly aimed at photo enthusiasts, we were amazed at the quality of black text on plain paper. Output would have been reasonably fast too, were it not for a bizarre quirk which meant that the printer paused for a few seconds at random intervals. Even so, it managed a reasonable five pages a minute, and took only 34 seconds to print a complex document containing text, graphics and photos. Image quality was decent at the standard quality setting, and colour accuracy was spot-on.

The i865 prints 4x6in photos in under a minute, with printing all the way to the edge of the paper. The results are virtually indistinguishable from 'proper' photo prints. A4 prints were just as impressive - and again, can be borderless. A full A4 page at photo quality prints in less than two and a half minutes.