Canon S 330 Photo

...front of the box of Canon S330 Photo printer I have just purchased for little over a month now. In short the answer is a big ‘Yes’, with the printer costing me only £62, and the price of the ink cartridges being the major reason I went for one of these instead of the similarly priced Epson C62 or HP 3820.

Canon has always been known for their digital imaging products such as photocopiers scanners, digital cameras and printers. On ...
...end products such as the Canon S750 and S900 are amongst the best photo quality printers out there. Canon’s downfall is their price on their printers, often quite expensive and when compared to similar products from Epson and HP, their printers look overpriced. The S330 Photo is Canon’s attempt at the budget end of the market and I must say, I am truly impressed.

=====Style/Build Quality=====

The Canon S330 Photo won’t ... more

Can I have photo quality at an affordable price? That’s the question on the front of the box of Canon S330 Photo printer I have just purchased for little over a month now. In short the answer is a big ‘Yes’, with the printer costing me only £62, and the price of the ink cartridges being the major reason I went for one of these instead of the similarly priced Epson C62 or HP 3820.

Canon has always been known for their digital imaging products such as photocopiers scanners, digital cameras and printers. On the home market though, their printers have not sold as well as the likes of Epson and HP, the market leaders. It’s a shame really as some of the higher end products such as the Canon S750 and S900 are amongst the best photo quality printers out there. Canon’s downfall is their price on their printers, often quite expensive and when compared to similar products from Epson and HP, their printers look overpriced. The S330 Photo is Canon’s attempt at the budget end of the market and I must say, I am truly impressed.

==Style/Build Quality

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The Canon S330 Photo won’t win any awards for being the prettiest or neatest looking printer on the market. In fact, when I first looked at it, I thought it was rather ugly in design with its none folding paper holding tray and its tacky ‘hook on to front’ output tray. The Epson C62 and HP 3820 both have foldable paper holding and output trays which makes them look neat and tidy when not in use. I guess for Canon to have concentrated on the image quality, they had to cut costs somewhere and in this case; it’s the folding paper trays. That aside, the build quality is solid and is well constructed.

Score: 3/5

==Installation

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Installation of printers these days are pretty foolproof; the Canon S330 Photo is no exception if you follow the Quick Start guide provided. Take off the several shipping tape around the printer, plug in the power cable, power on the printer, open front cover and install the 2 cartridges. Finally attach the paper trays and USB cable between the printer and your PC/Mac. As with most budget printers under £100, there is no USB cable supplied so if you don’t have one already, then you need to buy one when you purchase the printer. They generally retail between £5-£15 depending where you purchase. The printer is only compatible with USB interfaces so check that your PC/Mac has USB ports before purchasing but if your machine is relatively new then they should have them. If not you could always get USB cards or USB hubs.

A small matter of installing the drivers later from the supplied CD-ROM and the S330 is ready to print.

Score: 4/5

==Photo Print Quality

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This is where the Canon S330 Photo printer really shines. What the printer lacks in style, it makes up for in photo print quality. I am often dubious about a printers claim that it produces realistic photo prints but in the case of the S330 it is totally justifiable. The S330 Photo has a resolution of 2400dpi x 1200 dpi which may not sound like much compared to the likes of Epson and HP with 4880dpi, but dpi isn’t as important as its made out to be. The finished printed result is.

Depending on what type of paper you use to print your photo prints, the S330 produces better results, as the paper gets better. On normal paper (80 gsm copier paper), the quality is not the best you will see, looking more like a colour photo in a tabloid newspaper (i.e. grainy) but that’s expected. Use anything decent though, like Kodak’s Glossy Picture Paper and the quality begins to show although in order to get the best, you can’t beat Canon’s own branded Photo Paper Pro which is designed to work in conjunction with all Canon printers to produce the best quality possible.

The Photo Paper Pro really does feel and look like real Photo paper being 245 gsm thick and glossy. Obviously quality does come at a price and you’d be looking at £10.99 (rrp) for a packet of 15 A4 sheets, but believe me, it’s worth every penny. There is also borderless 6 x 4 paper but at the time of writing, I’m finding it hard to source some. The printer does come with a tester pack of 5 sheets of 6 x 4 Photo Paper Pro and it’s a cleaver marketing ploy, as when you finished printing 5 photos on the 5 sheets, you be wanting more and no other paper will do! A packet of borderless 6 x 4 Photo Paper Pro (20 sheets) cost £5.49 (rrp).

The best feature of this printer has to be the borderless printing. No more worries about whether any bits of the photo will be printed outside of the printable area of the paper or the strange white border. This printer prints right to the edge on either A4 or 6 x 4 paper, which is adequate for most. In a way this was one of my deciding factors for buying this printer as both the HP 3820 and Epson C62 didn’t have this feature. Borderless printing is usually seen on more expensive printers, which makes the Canon S330 have a clear advantage over its similarly priced rivals.

Banding (noticeable lines through the printed image) is kept to a minimal and after throwing all sorts of digital photos at the S330, only the very eagled eyed of people will notice the occasion lines. I must stress though, the printed image quality really depends on the source material the printer has to work with; obviously the higher the resolution, the better the printed image. If you are printing from a digital camera, I personally think that a resolution of 2.0 million pixels is recommended. A very useful utility that comes with the printer is Canon’s Easy Photo-Print, which is EXIF complaint which allows you to print the photo onto paper exactly how you captured it. Ever thought that your digital photos looked different when they were printed? Slighter darker or less detailed? I always thought this too of most printers but when I used the S330 on my first few days, I was surprisingly gob smacked. I can truly say that the prints I have been getting are a match for traditional developed photographs.

To print out a 6 x 4 photo image on the best quality takes just over a minute and an A4 print takes about 3-5 minutes, which is speedy considering the price of the printer.

Score 5/5

==Document Print Quality

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It’s not hard these days to print good quality black text on white paper, often nearly matching a laser printer, but you’d be surprised how many printers still print out jagged text. The S330 does a fine job of printing out mono text documents printing out crisp and sharp results and churning out an impressive 14 pages per minute in draft mode and 10.5 pages per minute in standard mode. With high quality text switched on, this figure drops down to about 4-5 pages per minute

In colour document mode (not Photo mode), and depending on the complexity of the page to be printed, the pages printed per minute can range from 4.7 to about 10 though I have to say the latter figure is rather unachievable unless you really don’t care about the quality.

One thing that the S330 isn’t very good at doing however is reverse printing where a document is white text on coloured background. I feel that it uses a bit too much ink in this sort of printing, leading to jagged text and slight bleeding around the edges. If you’re into a lot of Desktop Publishing (DTP), where there is a lot of reverse printing, then this printer might not be the best choice just for this reason.

Score 3/5

==Noise Level

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One problem I’ve always had with Epson (after owning about 3), is their noise level on their printers whilst printing, it made such a racket. HP on the other hand is surprisingly quiet. It’s like comparing a diesel engine with a refined petrol engine!

Thankfully, the Canon S330 Photo, is in between the 2 being actually quite quiet whilst printing. There is even a ‘quiet mode’, which has to be turned on but hinders the print speed. I didn’t really notice that much difference between normal and quiet mode anyway.

The thing that lets the printer down is it’s constant cleaning mode that it just seems to go into once in a while thus making a great deal of unnecessary whirring and churning. When I first bought the printer, I though something was wrong with it, but it is normal.

Score 3/5

==Ink Cartridges & Cost of Printing

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Inside the printer, another sign of its budget under pinning is the lack of independent colour ink tanks. Unlike dedicated photo printers that have a separate ink cartridge for each colour (usually 3 to 6), the S330 Photo has a black cartridge slot and a colour cartridge slot which holds 3 colours in one cartridge. The benefit of independent ink cartridges is that you are less likely to waste ink as you only need to replace the colour that is low, unlike all in one cartridges, where you have to throw away the remainder of the other 2 colours if one has ran out, as all 3 are on the same cartridge.

To have independent colour tanks would have bumped up the price of the S330 though and one thing that this printer has written all over it, is value for money. Not only is the printer cheap to buy, but the ink cartridges are cheap as well! Cheap ink cartridges? You must be joking right? Nope, I couldn’t believe it myself and in the end it was this factor that made me buy it over the similarly price Epson C62, which had replacement ink cartridges nearing £30!

The colour ink cartridge (BCI-24 Colour) costs only £12.99 and the black ink (BCI-24 Black) was even more ridiculous at only £6.99 and both are Canon original cartridges. At prices like these, you won’t have to hunt around for cheaper ink or get third party cartridges or refills.

Okay so the cartridges themselves may be smaller than rivals, thus giving a smaller yield; black is about 130 pages and colour is about 170 pages, giving a cost per page of 3.8p and 5.9p respectively. If you are a high volume user though, this might slightly annoy you, having to change cartridges all the time, but on the other hand if you are an occasional to moderate user, then this shouldn’t be a problem, as the ink will last for a while. It makes a welcome change to run out of ink and have the knowledge that the cartridges won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Score: 4/5

==Included Software

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As if the value of this printer couldn’t be any more value for money, what does Canon go and do? Throw in a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements! So it’s only the original version (its now on version 2), but at one time this use to sell for about £80 and is very good cut down version of its bigger brother Adobe Photoshop. The inclusion Elements is great added value allowing you to clear up your images from things like red eye and blurriness and resize and manipulate before printing. It’s much better at doing digital zoom enhancements than using the digital zoom on a digital camera too!

As mention before, Canon’s Easy Photo-Print is the fabulous utility that allows you to print photos in 3 easy steps. Select photo or photos, select paper type and size and then print. The software even allows you to do a variety of styles, such as index prints or 4 photos on 1 sheet of A4.

Generally, I think Canon have come up with great value added software package for the S330 Photo.

Score: 5/5

==Specification and Requirements

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Here are all the boring specs! (Source: Canon UK website)

Print Quality Resolution: 2400 x 1200dpi
Printing Speed: 3 Mono Text: Up to 14 ppm (max), 10.5 ppm (standard)
Colour Graphics: Up to 10 ppm (max), 4.7 ppm (standard)
A4 photo: Up to 0.37 ppm (standard)
Paper Size: A4, B5, A5, Letter, Legal, Envelopes (DL size or Commercial 10), 4"x 6" & custom size
Interface: USB 2.0 Full Speed
Power Source AC 220-240V 50-60Hz
Power Consumption 2W (standby), 30W (printing)
Dimensions (WxDxH) 390 x 248 x 185mm
Weight 3.4kg

Operating System Requirements:
Windows: PC with Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Millennium or Windows 98, USB interface8, CD-ROM Drive
Free hard disk space for printer driver installation: 25MB for Windows 2000/XP, 15MB for Windows Me/98

Macintosh:
Macintosh computer with Mac OS 8.6-9.x or Mac OS X v10.19 or later, USB interface
Free hard disk space for printer driver installation: 30MB for Mac 8.6-9.x, 100MB for Mac OS X v10.1

==Buying

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It is easy to get the Canon S300 and the Canon S330 Photo mixed up, so be careful when you buy, as they look identical. The differences between the two printers are almost negligible except the S330 Photo does borderless printing whilst the S300 doesn’t. PC World being PC World (and other retailers) will still try to palm you off with the older model, which is about £5-£10 less but don’t save that little bit and go straight for the S330!

The cost of the printer varies depending on where you buy it. On dabs.com, it currently retails at £75 inc VAT, whilst PC World will set you back £5 more at £79.99. The cheapest I’ve seen this is at Office World, which has it retailing for £69.99, but when I bought it, they had a 10% sale on, so I got mine for £62. Once again, it is better to buy it on the credit card, if your card company offers extended warranty outside of the 12 months

==Conclusion

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After using my Lexmark Z13 for about a year for very occasional text printing, I wanted to upgrade my printer to allow me to print photo quality pictures at a reasonable price with all factors considered. It was a tough decision between the Epson C62 and HP 3820, which were the first and second choice, when I was doing my research but in the end the Canon S330 Photo had too many things going for it.

Cheap to purchase, cheap ink cartridges, fantastic photo printing for price, and speedy and quiet in operation. The added bonus of the borderless printing is the icing on the cake! There are one or two niggles but at this price, I’m not complaining and the good far outweigh the bad. If you’re looking for a good all round printer for under £100, this should seriously be on your consideration list.

Thanks for reading!
(c) Ray Liu 2002

 

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