Canon i80 review

What's the point in having a dinky little laptop that you can tidy away when you need to reclaim the dining room table - and teaming it up with a huge, clunky old inkjet?

What you need is a printer that's as compact, portable and easy to store as your computer. Canon's i80 is a printer specifically designed for the job. It's compact, light, and Canon claims it can print photos at the same quality as a professional desktop printer. At just 31x17x5cm, it will slip neatly into most notebook bags. At 1.8kg, it's pretty light, though to be honest, we still wouldn't want to hump it around for too long.

The Canon's top cover keeps it well protected when closed, and opens out to form the paper input tray. However, the top of this tray is curved, so you wouldn't want to leave paper in it for any length of time, as it will curl at the corners. When it's opened up, the i80's lid doubles as a paper input tray. There's no paper output tray; printed pages just slide out onto your desk.

Of the compromises that have to be made to make this printer so small, the most significant is the size of the ink cartridges. There are two: one for black, one for colour - and both are absolutely tiny. They will only last for approximately 100 pages. And with replacement cartridges costing a total of £35, this is a very expensive printer to run. Frustratingly, even though the driver software warns you when ink is running low, you can't visually check ink levels.

Print quality is impressive for a portable printer. Text output is surprisingly crisp, even on plain paper. Graphics output on plain paper is reasonable, although the i80 has a tendency to oversaturate colours, especially reds. It also produces more-than-adequate photo quality output on glossy paper, although nowhere near up to the standard of a dedicated photo printer.

Print speed was about five pages per minute in Standard quality mode. This is nowhere near the manufacturer's quoted speed, but that's par for the course with most inkjet printers. For a printer this size, that's actually a pretty decent speed. Similarly, a 6x4in photo took just over a minute to print: a solid result.

As well as having a standard USB connector, the i80 can also link wirelessly to your laptop, making it easier to use on the move, when you might not have cables readily to hand.

The i80 is an excellent portable printer - slimline, easy to carry around and capable of producing good results as decent speeds. The only downside is that it's expensive to run.

Author: Mike Hirschkorn