Product Reviews

With most inkjet printers now capable of producing true photo-quality output, print speed is more of a distinguishing factor between models than print quality. Canon claims its new Pixma iP4200 can produce 4x6in prints in just 51 seconds, which is great if you don't like waiting to see your holiday snaps.

The box-like iP4200 is a bit on the bulky side for an inkjet printer, but its design is at least relatively neat. Neither the paper-in, nor paper-out, tray protrudes far from the main body of the device. The disadvantage of this is that, when you're printing many pages, your prints soon start to slide out of the tray. As well as the in-tray, there's also

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a cassette that slots under the printer, but this is solely for photo-size paper and is too small for A4 sheets.

Canon uses separate ink cartridges and print heads in its BubbleJets, which means you can replace both independently and for less money than with other manufacturers' printers. The Pixma uses five, rather than four, ink supplies - four for dye-based cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink, plus one more for pigment-based black.

This printer has a high photo resolution of 9,600x2,400dpi. This doesn't necessarily mean good quality photos; but in this case it does. Colours were reproduced accurately, with even the smallest detail picked out in our test photos. At normal quality text was bold and black. However, it deteriorated once we switched to draft settings.

So what about print speed? In Standard Quality mode, 4x6in prints do indeed appear in well under a minute. We couldn't match Canon's claim of 14.7 pages per minute (ppm) when printing text - but our figure of 10ppm is still impressive.

The Pixma iP4000 is a very good printer. It prints both photos and text quickly, and at high quality. It's not pretty - and it's a bit on the pricey side - but it's well designed and easy to use. Well worth a Recommended award.