| If you are researching a new Color Inkjet Printer , we hope that
our Canon i320 Review, Rating & Buyers Guide will
help you.Canon was one of the first vendors to provide a reasonably
priced inkjet printer, and remains a major player in this still expanding
market. Canon has than a dozen models that fall into the mobile, photo
printer, and general-purpose areas. The Canon i320 is one of the least
expensive models in the lineup. Designed for all-purpose use, this
sub-$80 printer provides fast output and a low initial purchase price.
The dual-cartridge design, with a tri-color and black ink cartridge,
does not let you get the most out of a cartridge (more expensive Canon
printers offer individual "ThinkJet" cartridges for each
color of ink, so no ink is wasted). The i320 does, however, use fairly
small-capacity cartridges; while you'll need to replace them more
frequently, they cost much less than cartridges from other vendors.
This makes the i320 a perfect printer for a user who does not print
reams of output a month.
Canon printers often have lower resolution than printers from other
vendors. The i320 has a default resolution of 600dpi in monochrome
printing and a maximum resolution of 2,400x1,200 dpi with color
printing. This does not automatically mean that the output from
a Canon printer is inferior to that from a printer with higher resolution.
Print quality is a result of both resolution and ink droplet size,
and the i320, with a new MicroFine Droplet Technology, can provide
excellent quality prints, especially at the higher quality settings
using Canon's photo paper. The i320 can also print borderless prints
on 4x6-inch photo paper. Output quality on these prints is very
good, especially when using the Exif Print software included with
the printer. This is an emerging standard for higher quality digital
prints and provides better color matching between the camera and
printer. The Exif Print capability is incorporated into the Canon
Easy-PhotoPrint utility supplied with the i320. Canon also included
drivers for both the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. The
printer interface is strictly USB, and it is the new faster USB
2.0, so to get the full speed from the printer, your PC must have
this newest interface. Even with the USB 2.0 interface on our test
platform, we never came close to Canon's claimed 10 pages per minute
in monochrome or 7 ppm in color. Our average print speeds were less
than half that fast, which is still speedy for a printer in this
price range.
Pro: Inexpensive, very good output quality, ink cartridges are
inexpensive.
Con: Ink cartridges have a small capacity.
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