Product Reviews

Canon got its timing spot on with this one. Kodak and HP are already out there with dedicated photo printers, and Epson is poised to launch its competitor, the PictureMate. Canon's offering, the CP-330 is about the size of a chunky paperback (think Lord of the Rings), is housed in a smart, silver casing and is both Direct Print and PictBridge aware, so will talk to compatible digital cameras without being plugged into your Mac. We even got it to talk to a mobile phone using an infrared connection, and printed unflattering grainy pictures from the onboard camera.

We're putting the blame for that grain firmly at the door of the phone, as the CP-330 is a dye-sub device offering continuous-tone images at 300 x 300dpi. At reading distance this makes the dots all but invisible to the naked eye. The finish is velvet-smooth and has the feel of a photo ouput from a high-street lab. Colours are bright, skin tones are realistic and edges are razor sharp. Obviously there's no feathering or blending of colours, as the paper never gets wet, which means there's no chance for it to soak up the ink.

The 'inks', such as they are, come in the form of a cartridge that slides through a door on one end. Each cartridge is designed to work with a specific paper size, so it's a case of matching up the sticker on the cartridge with the one on the paper, which strikes us as needlessly confusing. Each contains a page-width strip of film onto which Canon

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has printed cyan, magenta and yellow panels. The paper is pulled through three times and exposed to each colour in turn, then run through one last time so it can be finalised by an overcoat. It's reminiscent of watching a small duplex printer.

All of these passes slow things down, of course. Printing from an eMac, our pictures took between one minute 34 and one minute 44 seconds to appear, which is considerably longer than Canon's 85-second estimate. Printing by infrared from a Sony Ericsson T610 took two minutes seven seconds, of which the first 30 seconds was taken up spooling the image. Each of these was printed to Canon's postcard media, which has tear-off edges and space for a stamp. Alternatives include credit-card-sized sheets, stickers and the so-called L-size, which tops out at 89 x 119mm when you opt for borderless output, and all are fairly priced. You have to use Canon's own paper, but it's bundled with the dye-sub cartridges, with enough paper and film for 108 prints topping out at £25.99. That's 24p a shot, including the tax. The CP-330 includes paper trays for all media types; its smaller brother, the CP-220, only has the tray for postcards, but you can get the credit-card-sized tray as an optional extra.

The bundled software includes Canon Image Browser and Canon Photostitch. The former is a poor man's iPhoto for organising and printing your photos; the latter links consecutive photos to form a panorama.

We have very few complaints about the CP-330. It's smart, fuss-free and clean. It's also very quiet, and if you want to use it on the move, it'll run off a bulky bundled battery. We were a little disappointed that it wasn't installed as a printer in OS X 10.3 in spite of the fact we'd run through the installation routine on the disc. While this dropped a driver on the hard drive, it left us to manually add it to our printer list. This is a mere niggle and otherwise the Canon CP-330 is a joy to use, cheap to run and more convenient than an inkjet if all you want to do is print photos.