Canon S530D review

Canon's S530D has a familiar feel about it, primarily because it uses the same body as the existing S820D. The LCD status panel and PC Card slot allow photos to be printed without a PC and there's a mini-USB port for direct printing from compatible Canon digital cameras. A colour preview LCD is optional for viewing images on memory cards - a standard feature of the HP Photosmart 7550 - and Canon also bundles a CompactFlash PC Card reader.

The ink system uses four separate tanks for minimum waste and replacements cost £9 for a black cartridge and £6 for a colour. Thanks to decent yields, which turned out to be almost double what Canon claimed, running costs are some of the lowest of all the photo printers on test. Like the 7550, colours are dye based with a pigmented black for crisp, deep black text.

Capable of a maximum resolution of 2,400 x 1,200dpi, the S530D falls behind other photo printers, but higher resolutions don't necessarily mean better quality. However, the relatively poor quality of the photo montage suggests the Canon's lower resolution could be to blame. When compared with the Epson Stylus Photo 950, the S530D's print was a lot lighter, grainier and suffered from banding.

Colour performance was fairly good, although the yellow cotton reel turned a mustard colour. On coated paper, colour fades were acceptable, but again solid colour boxes were grainier than we'd have expected at this price. The S530D's worst moment came when printing colour images on plain paper. Colours were muddy and graininess again prevailed, although there was no banding.

Where the S530D excelled was in printing text and colour business reports in normal mode, which it did quickly and at a surprisingly high quality. Obviously, this isn't great news if you're looking to mainly print photos, but makes the S530D a more versatile device.

Printing documents extremely quickly was the S530D's main redeeming feature, and it was by far the fastest photo printer on test. Printing the A4 photo montage took under three minutes, while the other three photo printers took over twice as long. Our standard letter was printed at over 8ppm, much faster than the Stylus Photo 925, which only managed 2.4ppm.

Unfortunately for Canon, we believe quality is more important than speed, so the apparent compromise hasn't paid off. The S530D gains some ground by offering borderless printing up to A4 and colour matching with Exif 2.2 support, but other niggles like the curved and exposed input and output paper trays all combine to leave the Canon without an award.