Product ReviewsPrinters
Canon's printers have been gaining a neat foothold in the Mac market against the likes of Epson and HP over the past couple of years. The S6300 is its new large-format Bubble Jet - in this case large format meaning the ability to print oversized A3 pages. This gives full-bleed printing for up-to-the-edge effects, plus crop and registration marks if desired. The printer itself is a desk-hugging, low-profile design, being a scant 190mm high, and is finished in two-tone slate and light grey. Around the back is a single USB port for attaching to the Mac and a PC parallel port. The first step in setting up the S6300 is the installation of the actual print head. This is built in (and undetachable) in other manufacturer's offerings, but Canon's products have always distinguished themselves by offering an optional scanning head that can be fitted in place of the print head, allowing the printer to double up for basic image and text scanning duties. Think tank Canon's printers also differ from others by offering separate ink tanks for the cyan, magenta and yellow inks. This saves money in the long term by allowing the individual inks to be swapped out rather than junking combined tanks for the sake of replacing one colour. Installation of the tanks is very straightforward and clearly explained in the setup guide. The printer ships with the relevant Mac OS 9 drivers on a CD. Once installed these provide the standard nozzle alignment, head cleaning and deep head cleaning (the latter being necessary on the first run). The driver utilities also provide options for auto power-off and for the scanning head. The S6300 offers four qualities of printed output: Text, Graphics, Photo and Manual for fine-tuning output. ColorSync 2.5 is used for colour matching. Burst bubble The
When we started the printing tests, the first thing we noticed was something that wasn't there: noise. This is quite simply the quietest printer we've ever come across, and in general operation its mechanical noise was drowned out by the fans of the Macs in the MacUser offices. Canon claims a maximum printing speed for text of 17ppm (pages per minute) for plain text and 13ppm for colour documents. However, as is always the case, real world performance falls a little short. We managed to print 10 pages in 53 seconds (with driver quality set to Text) of 14pt Helvetica, which is still fairly fast for an inkjet. This was, however, with foreground printing, which ties up your Mac until the job is completed. With background printing on, the time for the same 10 pages increased to just over five minutes. In Mac OS X, all the printing is done in the background, but we couldn't get the printer to work with the OS X driver downloaded from Canon's Web site, although this should be soon remedied. Colour printing is rated at 13ppm, but of course that's for a page containing a few pie charts and mostly text. The measured output for a photographic TIFF file onto glossy photo paper was three minutes and 12 seconds for an A4 page, which isn't bad. On Canon's own PhotoPro paper the speed was six seconds more. Both were on Photo quality settings. Putting a full A3+ bleed image through on PhotoPro paper gave a time of just under seven minutes, which is pretty good. Detail on all our test images was excellent, but blacks weren't quite up to the depth of our reference prints. However, this isn't a problem peculiar to Canon printers. At standard Photo settings there was a slight red cast to prints, which necessitated a little tweaking with the driver settings to get rid of. The one drawback we noticed was a subtle banding, evident in large areas of constant colour. As a complete package this is an attractive product, and can be upgraded to a networkable, shared printer. The almost silent operation and solid print quality will make it particularly attractive in shared environments. By Tim Danaher |
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