Canon S450

It's been a while since Canon updated its desktop inkjet range, and its new S series represents its latest stab at this highly competitive market. Canon's BJC-8200 (see Labs, issue 67, p98) offered the best photo quality we've ever seen, but suffered because of pricing and poor general printing ability. Another photo printer is promised in the form of the S800, but in the meantime Canon is introducing us to the new range with the economically-priced S450.

This is a compact little box, with the usual paper support and output-trays sprawling across the desk. These are detachable though, so it doesn't take up much space when not in use. The S450 uses individual C, M and Y cartridges for colour and a larger black cartridge for mono tasks.

This is actually quite significant, as at a price of £119, and an estimated street price of £101, the S450 is a perfect competitor to Lexmark's Z52 (see Labs, issue 77, p92). In fact, in our 25-page plain text test on standard mode on plain paper, the Canon was actually faster, producing the document in four minutes, 35 seconds against the Lexmark's four minutes, 48 seconds. The print speed has been slightly increased by the paper feed mechanism, which suddenly sucks the paper into the machine, compared to the slow gliding mechanism employed by the HP 990Cxi (see Labs, issue 77, p92). The print quality isn't bad either, with sharp black characters and minimal scratchiness, although it's not quite as sharp as the Z52's results.

Unfortunately, when it comes to colour printing things start to go down hill. The main problems concern obvious grain and harsh colour mixes, where the composite colour make-up can be seen too easily. Even using Canon's high-quality HR-101 coated paper couldn't smooth out the banding problems and distorted colour mixes. In its defence the colour balance was just about right - accurate grey scales with no blue or green tinge - and, with the exception of a faded purple, the Pantone reproduction was reasonably accurate too, which is impressive for such a low-cost printer.

Photo printing was a disappointment though, and while it managed to strike a more even colour balance than the Lexmark Z52, the S450 looked significantly distorted and grainy compared to Epson and Hewlett-Packard's recent designs. Again the colour mix is overly harsh, with large blue and red dots in light areas, and again it was far too grainy by modern standards. The other problem is banding across the page, which was also apparent in the plain paper image quality test. To be fair, the S450 wasn't ideally set up for photo printing. This would require using the optional photo cartridge, which replaces the large black cartridge with three photo inks, including some lighter shades. This might solve a number of issues with colour printing, but unfortunately the basic S450 doesn't come equipped with these specialised inks.

The other problem is speed.Taking 16 minutes, 59 seconds to produce a below-satisfactory A4 photo, the S450 is hardly a Japanese bullet train. Even worse was the five-page DTP test, with high-quality text and low-resolution graphics, again printed on Canon's HR-101 paper. The S450 took a laborious 41 minutes, 12 seconds to complete the task, so while it will make a great basic office printer for letters and text-heavy documents, you can't expect good-quality complex colour printing if you're in a hurry.

The individual ink tanks give it an economic advantage over its nearest HP and Epson competitors though. So if you exhaust one ink before another, you can replace them as you go, rather than having to fork out for a new cartridge every time. This seems to be a popular path these days, with the Xerox DocuPrint M760 (see Labs, issue 77, p92) and the Sharp AJ-2100 (reviewed p145) both employing a similar system. Working out at 7.4p per colour page at five per cent coverage, it's relatively cheap to run too, and at 2.1p per mono page, it will be a cheap basic printer.