Canon Pixma iP1200 review

This is one of the cheapest inkjets we've seen.

Hardly any wonder then that it's not much of looker, but it's small, so won't take up much desk space. The power supply is internal too, which helps save space. Unsurprisingly for such a budget model, the Pixma's printer driver doesn't allow you to manually tweak the photo you're about to print - there are a couple of preset optimisation filters and that's it. It does, however, handle borderless printing well - which we thought was quite impressive.

Even more of a throwback than the iP1200's looks was its use of three inks. Almost all inkjets these days use four inks, which they mix to create millions of different shades and colours. Really good photo printers use six or even eight inks. We haven't seen a three-ink A4 printer for years and years - and frankly, we'd hoped never to see one again. Prints from the iP1200 weren't absolutely awful, but they weren't that great either. Text was grey and looked slightly faded compared with the bold, clean blacks of a printer with a dedicated black cartridge. Our colour graphic test suffered from very bad banding, which is when areas of colour have light and dark stripes running through them. Photographs were all right at first glance, but compared with the original file it soon became apparent that they were slightly off-colour, with a yellowish tint, and that details weren't rendered as precisely as they were on slightly more expensive printers. Very colourful pictures looked oversaturated and details, such as the texture of fruit in a still life, were lost because the iP1200 couldn't reproduce enough distinct shades of colour to render them properly.

The Pixma managed 2.7ppm when printing text at standard quality and 1.7ppm when printing graphics. It printed our test A4 photo in 4 minutes and 50 seconds. These aren't fantastic times - nowhere near the manufacturer's quoted figures - but they're not bad times either. Print costs are actually quite good - better than the iP3000, the budget Canon printer in our buying guides.

We can see what Canon is trying to do with this, and as a cheap and cheerful second printer for the kids, the iP1200 isn't bad value. But if you have any interest in your photos and letters looking at all nice, then look elsewhere.