Product Reviews

Canon's PIXMA mini220 is a compact photo printer, though it looks more like a futuristic toy tank. At £57 including VAT it's very affordable; Epson's PictureMate 240, which won a Best Buy award in What's New, Shopper February 2007, costs £75.

Most models in Canon's Selphy range are dye-sublimation printers, but the PIXMA mini220 is an inkjet that takes a single, tiny cartridge. This is fitted under a flip-up top panel that houses the main controls, but it doesn't feel secure when closed.

You can buy the printer's BCI-16 cartridge for about £15. Canon's yield figures say it will print around 66 photos, giving a high cost per page of around 23p without including paper. For a little more money, you can buy a pack, which comes with two cartridges and 100 sheets of glossy photo paper.

The mini220's paper tray folds down at its front. It's unusual in that each sheet is drawn through the printer like a dye-sub, protruding by a couple of inches from the rear before printing begins. Paper isn't flipped over as we'd expect from a conventional U-path feed, so you must

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load sheets print-side up. Printed photos come to rest on top of the input tray, but there's little to keep them there and they spill over the desk. We can only assume that Canon's designers expected users to snatch each print up eagerly as soon as it was finished.

Unfortunately, the mini220's print quality makes this scenario unlikely. It prints with only cyan, magenta and yellow inks, and with no dedicated black it has to create the darkest shades using a dense combination of all three. When first printed, areas of black look more like very dark green. Though they improve if left to dry for a few hours, they don't have the impact we would expect from a good photo print, with dark areas remaining comparatively poorly detailed. All our test prints were sharp and free from banding, though.

When printing from a computer, photos had a warm orange-brown bias, which made for flattering portraits but didn't suit all subjects. Photos printed directly from an SD card seemed more neutral and appeared far more quickly, with six shots taking just six minutes and 48 seconds, which is very fast for an inkjet. The printer's menu system is fairly easy to use. Confusingly, though, there's a separate settings button in addition to the options available through the main menu. It was slow to read and display each image from our SD card, and you'll need an adaptor if you want to access photos on an xD card.

The mini220's looks divided opinion in the Shopper office, and its light cream plastic seemed to get grubby in use quickly. It doesn't feel especially well made and produces disappointing, expensive prints. We would rather spend the extra £18 on the PictureMate 240 instead.