We eventually decided that the Lexmark printer that came free with our laptop had to be replaced, the ink was expensive the print quality was poor. Walking around our local Dixon's we came across the Canon Smartbase M360, what struck us the most was the color of the unit, all other printers lined up on the shelf were white or beige this one is a sort of blueish color.
The printer is a multi function device, meaning that it is a normal color printer, scanner and photocopier all rolled into one. The full specification for the printer can be found here;
http://www.canon.co.uk/For_Home/Product_Finder/Multifunctionals/Multifunctionals/SmartBase_MP360/
Bundled with the printer is a selection of printable media, 3 A4 gloss sheets, 3 A4 matt sheets 3 A4 Photographic sheets and various thickness of card. The printer comes with 1 black and 1 color ink cartridge. A power cord, USB2.0 cable, drivers disk, software disk and user manual. When we purchased the smartbase
the retail price was £89.00 this was from Dixon's.
The supplied media is a great idea, if you were like us we were that focused on buying the printer we forgot to buy the paper and ink for it. The supplied paper is quickly used up when you first get the printer while you play around with settings and the same goes for the supplied ink, which I would argue were only half full.
The printer makes use of USB to connect to your computer, even though the printer is USB version 2 it will still work with older motherboards that have version 1 of USB. The USB cable is supplied.
The user manual is well written and easy to follow, the printer has 6 buttons on it one of which is the on/off button so there is not too many buttons to get confused with as all the printers functions are easy to perform. My wife who is hopeless with computers was able to operate the Smart base without reading the manual. The only time we did read it was when we put the new ink into the printer.
Installing the ink is straight forward. There is two ways to do this, one by using the software that will give instructions every step of the way and is ideal if you have never done this before. The second method which is quicker is to just switch on the printer press the button and open the print tray, the ink cartridges will then move to the middle, Unclip the locking flap and the cartridge will pop out. No mess and no fuss just the way it should be.
The printer uses 2pl droplet technology, which essentially means that the ink is placed exactly where it should on the paper giving a much clearer and crisper image, the downside is that the printer uses twice as much ink.
The ink for the printer is reasonably priced with original genuine Canon cartridges selling at around £16 for a pack of 4 colour and 4 black. The serial numbers for these cartridges are BCI-24B - Black Ink and BCI-24C for colour ink. However there is also compatible ink cartridges that work just as good as the original's and these are a bit cheaper Cartex.co.uk sells the compatible ink for 99p per cartridge when bought in packs of five.
The supplied software is adequate but not outstanding I would prefer to use Photoshop which has much more features and more support available on the web. The supplied software will allow you to do the basic touch ups to photos but it is awkward to use. The
OCR software supplied works very well and is just as good as any other OCR package that I have used. The drivers install automatically when the printer is plugged into your computer for the
first time. The drivers show information relating to the level of ink in each cartridge and provide tools for aligning the print heads and cleaning the print nozzles. Also when ink is running low in the cartridges a warning is shown on the
LCD screen of the printer and on the computer along with an estimate of how many pages can be printed until the ink is dry.
Oddly, this is the only printer I have had where the nozzles have not became blocked, the Lexmark that we used to own was terrible for this and so was the Cannon that my parents use Not that I am complaining of course.
Printing
As regards to the quality of the printer, its brilliant, even the draft mode gives a high quality print. When used on decent photo paper and on high settings the printed photograph is as good as anything you would get from a Kodak photo Kiosk. Text when printed is clear clean and crisp, but most of all the ink does not smudge when the text has been printed. The printer is also quick, on high quality photo prints and high quality text you would be surprised at how quick the smartbase can produce the final pages.
Scanning
Large enough for an A4 size paper, The scanner on the smartbase makes use of CCD technology similar as to that used by FujiFilm in some of their top of the line cameras. Essentially the technology gives a far sharper image, this is done by taking two scans of the original image and then overlaying the images to give one complete scan. In my experience of scanners (Black Widow Faltbed scanner) the one provided with the smart base is much better, giving bright true to life colours. The only niggle with this is the scanning software I find it difficulty to use when trying to select only part of the image to scan, but then I have had this trouble with every scanner that I have used, so it might just be me.
Photocopy
The photocopy function can be used without the smartbase being connected to the computer. Just insert the item to photo copy into the scanner and press the copy button and comes the exact duplicate. We have only used the photocopy a handful of times but the results are as good as that produced for the big photocopier in the office.
The smartbase has a small LCD screen perhaps 0.5 inch by 2 inch that gives a status of the printer and the name of the current file being printed along with a progress report. This is a nifty little feature that I have often found myself referring to especially that the printer is shared by 3 computers on the home network.
Issues, well niggles really. The colour of the device, it looked good in the shop but at home it looks a bit out of place, But then at the end of the day I am more concerned with the quality it produces than the colour of the finish. As mentioned above the supplied software is adequate and will do the job but I prefer to use Photoshop or a similar product when touching up photos.
Price wise the smartbase is competitive and nowadays can be purchased for a bit less than the £90 that we paid for it. I have even seen the smartbase bundled with a high end computer system from PC World.
As mentioned above the printer is hsared between a number of computers and so far we have not had any misprints or lost pages from it. The smartbase does appear to be very stable. I am unable to comment towards the support for the printer but i have heard good reviews about Canons customer service teams.
All in all this is a good product, cheap to run with ink costing 99p the supplied bundle is good for starters. There is no fiddling around with setting up drivers and the software tools can take you step by step through installing ink and what not. Quality and speed is top notch so you cant go wrong with this.
05.05.2009 18:01
I had the same model until it died recently (the purge unit went), I've had it for about 6 years now, very good printer it's a shame though all new Canon's don't take the BCI-24 cartridges now, the new ones take really expensive cartridges. I've just replaced it with a Brother MFC printer with ADF and Fax machine (only cost £79.99 (rrp £149.99) from Rymans and the cartridges are nearly as cheap).
10.01.2008 20:19
I'll be sticking with my HP as it goes with my laptop, very helpful review
07.11.2006 15:28
Also have a canon, not same model though, but very happy with it. Great review.