Canon i 320

...Having only a very ancient Canon BJ330 that I had used when a student we decided to spend a bit of money and upgrade. Even with buying a new printer and reams of cards from Hobbycraft it would still work out cheaper than buying pre-printed invites(and more personal too!). Anyway, I digress you want to hear about the printer...

*Price*
A bargain £40 from Staples.

*Looks*
Nice casing with the blue and ivory ...
...road.
It comes with Canon Easy-PhotoPrint software which isn't fancy but covers all the basics to get your photos out of your digital camera and onto paper. The is easily installed from the cd provided by following the on-screen instructions.

*Performance*
It produces good quality images and text, the manufacturer states that it can do up to 2400 x 1200 color dpi resolution, which doesn't mean a lot unless you're going ... more

In order to try and save a bit on money on our wedding invitations myself and hubby2be decided it would be a lot more economical to design and print them ourselves. Having only a very ancient Canon BJ330 that I had used when a student we decided to spend a bit of money and upgrade. Even with buying a new printer and reams of cards from Hobbycraft it would still work out cheaper than buying pre-printed invites(and more personal too!). Anyway, I digress you want to hear about the printer...

*Price*
A bargain £40 from Staples.

*Looks*
Nice casing with the blue and ivory colours - although sadly it doesn't now match our spangly new silver coloured PC! I'm sure I can hide it under the desk though as it doesn't take up much room and the tray / feeder fold up easily.

*Set-Up*
It's a USB printer so is pretty much plug-and-play with Win98 and above. The instruction manual is laid out nice and simply with good diagrams and screen-shots (pictures are always helpful!). My only moan is that it didn't come with its own USB lead and it wasnt clearly stated on the box, so we had to go back to the shop and get one.
The 'innards' are fairly simple, and not a lot different to the old Canon. I gues it's just the print head and motors that are improved on. There's probably not a lot you can do about the mechanics of it all!

It takes 2 cartridges, one black and one colour. These are easily installed - and if you forget there are arrows that tell you what goes where on the inside of the printer. The cartridges are only about £10 to replace, which is very good value and are even available at our Tescos down the road.
It comes with Canon Easy-PhotoPrint software which isn't fancy but covers all the basics to get your photos out of your digital camera and onto paper. The is easily installed from the cd provided by following the on-screen instructions.

*Performance*
It produces good quality images and text, the manufacturer states that it can do up to 2400 x 1200 color dpi resolution, which doesn't mean a lot unless you're going to count dots, but they did look almost laser quality to me. It is also very quick - allegedly up to 10 pages per minute black and up to 7 ppm color, I think that's a fair estimation - it does print at about 7ppm on default print mode, and is about 20x faster than the old Canon BJ330.

We easily managed to set it up to print on odd-shaped invitation card with few problems. The main hassle being setting up Word to print set the pages to the correct size rather than the printer!

*Photo Printing*
Unfortunaltely it can't print A4 right to the edge of the page without a margin, so for full-size A4 prints you have to do a bit of paper trimming. However we've now printed out some of our honeymoon photos onto A4 photo paper and it happily prints out 10" x 8" photos. The quality is fairly good - you can tell it's not a laser printer as if you squint hard at the paper and you can see the faint ink-jet lines, but at a normal distance with the photos in a frame you would never know that it wasn't a proper print.

*Noise*
Ok, it's not the quietest printer in the world and yes it can be heard through the floorboards, so if you're after a silent printer this isn't for you! But then for the price that it costs I hadn't really expected it to be.

Recently replaced by the i350.

Overall excellent value, would make a great student or family printer.

http://www.canon.co.uk/
http://www.staples.co.uk 

...less