Product Reviews

This is a serious printer! With its flashy silver and black colour scheme, and £235 price tag, it's dubbed by Canon as a "photographer's printer". This is clearly one for the connoisseur. If you fancy yourself as Lord Lichfield, this could be the perfect partner.

Thankfully, the i950 has the print quality to match its design, especially if you're printing photos. It doesn't matter how long you stare at your photo prints, you won't find any grain - even if you try to catch it out by printing on high-quality photo paper, which shows up any deficits a printer may have. It even prints quickly. The i950 took just two minutes and ten seconds to print a full-size A4 photo at the highest resolution - now that's what I call speed!

All of this is, of course, pretty useless if your photos end up with big ugly white margins round the edges. Fortunately, borderless printing is something the i950 does with pride, and on both A4 and 4x6in photo paper too. Printing a borderless A4 photo adds one minute and 46 seconds to the print time but this is still exceptionally quick, and it'll even print a borderless 4x6in photo in one minute and 12 seconds.

The

And black-and-white text is where the i950 might disappoint. It wasn't really designed with such mundane tasks as printing out letters and essays in mind. It'll do it, and unlike many photo printers, the quality isn't bad either, but you'll find yourself checking your watch while you wait. Computer Buyer's five-page black text test on plain paper averaged 2.22ppm, and actually took longer to print than an A4 photo.

This type of printing isn't very economic either, mainly because the black cartridge is the same size as the colour cartridge. It makes sense for printing photos, but it'll mean a few trips to the stationers if you're planning to print out more than the odd letter in black ink. Luckily, the cost isn't huge, and a £7 black cartridge is reasonable for 210 pages. What's more, Canon's ink-tank system means you only replace individual colours when you need to.

While the cartridge costs are wallet-friendly enough, the cost of the i950 itself certainly isn't. At £276 including VAT, it's well over double the price of Canon's i550, which also offers borderless photo printing and quicker, better-quality black text printing on standard paper. With its six-colour mechanism, the i950 does produce far superior photos. For this, it should be applauded. Even so, given its high price, only professional (or, at least, very keen) photographers who require a dedicated photo printer should consider buying one.