Canon Bubble Jet i475D Racine WI

Rating: 5/10

Canon makes some excellent pieces of equipment, and their printers are no exception. The i475D is at the lower/middle end of the printer market, not super cheap, but hardly expensive either. It builds on the i455 design, and adds a few extra twists for the addition £20 they ask. The printing engine is the same 'basic' two car black and three colour concept, with colour resolution a staggering 4800 x 1200. So they made a choice here to use super high resolution to compensate on photo output for not having light inks. The results suggest this was a good choice, because the output looks great, if slightly washed out compared with Epson photo printing. The extra options are for both memory stick and direct camera printing, as the unit acts as a USB hub to the four memory types you can insert (Smart Media, Compact Flash, Secure Digital, Sony Memory Stick). PC independent printing is handled via an LCD control panel, but sadly no image preview is available. To solve this it allows you to do a proof print where all the images are numbered. Then you can select an image by number and print in the manner you want. This is all done very slickly, and if you are PC connected you can press a button on the printer to make the image appear on the PC, or even be saved there automatically. Direct printing from the camera requires a Canon digital camera, and works in a similar fashion. Overall this is a neat package with each aspect of the printing process being well thought out. The printer is small, light, easy to setup, well built and relatively quiet.

It's only USB, not parallel - but this won't bother most people these days. This whole review would be a rave if it wasn't for one small thing - ink. When you first unpack the printer you must install the ink cartridges, and you'll be amazed how small they are. I weighed the colour one, which came in just over 20gs. One's immediately drawn to the conclusion that the size has some purpose which relates to selling replacement ink. Canon's own figures claim that the colour ink will do 160 pages at 5% coverage, which I would suggest means less than 15 full colour images. With a colour cart costing around £11 that would be at best 75p a print. The word 'gouge' seems insufficiently strong to represent how I feel about that. Black printing is even worse with only 130 pages at 5%, but the ink is only half the price. That makes printing black text cost about 2.6p a page, which is many times what a cheap laser printer would produce pages at. If you want to do photo printing this is a very good solution, but don't ever use it for black text printing unless you have money to burn. The i475D is an excellent product marred by the cynical profiteering aspect of the ink capacity. I'd happily pay twice the price for this machine if this wasn't the case.

For more information, visit Micromart.co.uk