Canon S750

A 'photo-quality' inkjet printer at a fair price.

Price: £189

Manufacturer: Canon

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The S750 offers excellent photo-quality prints, but we were slightly worried about the magenta ink tank problem.

Claudia Randall, What PC? 04 Jul 2002

So-called 'photo-quality' inkjet printers have been around for some time, and any new entrant to the market has to have something special if it's to stand out.

Canon's latest model, the S750, has a redesigned print head which the company claims increases output speed and eliminates the banding effect caused by poor alignment of the ink nozzles as they pass over the paper.

Canon says that the S750 can print up to 20 pages per minute (ppm) for mono prints, 13ppm for colour and 2.5ppm for a full-colour A4 page in default mode.

It sounds impressive but, as always, the manufacturer's figures are a little optimistic. In tests the S750 managed just over 7ppm for text output, while A4 photographs appeared at the rate of one every two and a half minutes.

So, it's slower than Canon's claims, but let's keep things in perspective: the printer is a good bit faster than many of its contemporaries.

The banding issue, which so often afflicts inkjet printouts, has been solved by what Canon calls Advanced Precision Colour Distribution Technology. In lay terms, a short gap separates the black and colour nozzles, enabling the black ink to dry before the colour jets are fired on top.

This ensures minimal ink bleed. In addition, the colour nozzles are mirrored, allowing the firing order of ink tanks to be the same on both passes of the bi-directional head. The machine also allows for borderless printing, so you can produce photographs without having to trim them afterwards.

Unfortunately, we did encounter problems. After about 40 prints on various media our magenta tank stopped printing, even though it still had ink in the reservoir.

Selecting the head-clean option fixed this temporarily but the problem did recur. However, Canon assures us that this was a one-off problem with our particular test model.

Price: £189 (inc VAT)

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