Canon i70 prints photos, documents for road warriors
Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta, zatni@cbn.net.id
It has been quite some time since we have seen a great portable printer from any of the top three printer makers. Besides, the idea of a portable printer that can print good-quality photos as well as color documents at a fairly high speed would still seem dubious at best. However, our friends at Canon have proven that it can be done -- albeit at a fairly high price, though.
Courtesy of Datascrip, Canon's distributor for Indonesia, I was once again allowed to test drive one of their newest products, the portable Canon i70 printer. This printer was launched last month, together with the Canon i850 and i950 BubbleJet printers.
The most striking thing is the great look of this printer. It has a beautiful, silvery color with a piece of transparent blue plastic that covers the printer well. It supports USB and Infrared connection, and the newer models of Canon PowerShot digital cameras can print directly to it. Its weight is 1.8 kilograms -- not too taxing for your shoulders.
* Easy to use
After I plugged the USB cable from my PC into the printer, it was immediately detected. I ran the installation program on the CD that came with the printer, and I was ready to print photos.
Despite its size -- only the thickness of a telephone directory -- this printer has an impressive print speed capability. It can churn out up to 13 pages of black-and-white documents per minute at a resolution of 600 by 600 dots per inch (DPI). If you have color on your pages, the speed will come down to around nine pages, with a resolution of 4800 by 1200 DPI. I printed four photos on a single, letter-sized, photographic- quality sheet of paper in little more than two minutes.
Of course, the photos were not as vibrant as those printed with printers that use six different colors. However, for a portable printer, the result was still surprisingly good. I also printed the photos using Premium Inkjet Photo paper from Fullmark, at about Rp 3,000 apiece.
Serious photographers should use original paper from the maker of their printer to ensure that the chemical interaction between the ink and the paper's coating will produce the best result.
Like the other, high-end printers from Canon, this one also uses the company's Advanced MicroFine DropLet Technology to ensure that the right amount of ink is applied to the paper and that the right size of dot is created. The cost of printing out photos with the i70 is quite reasonable, too, particularly now that the rupiah has appreciated against the U.S. dollar.
According to Datascrip, the black ink cartridge costs US$10, while the three-color ink cartridge costs $18.50. They also said that these cartridges have enough ink to print up to 200, 4-inch by 6-inch photos.
Although it is a portable printer, it can print on transparencies, envelopes and even T-Shirt transfers. It can print without borders, which means that the ink will be applied all the way to the edges of the paper. You can load up to 30 sheets of plain paper for longer document printing, but banner printing is not possible.
* Great software
The printer comes with a set of software programs, including Easy Photoprint (shown in the accompanying picture). It led me step by step when I prepared the photos for printing, from choosing the photo files to the type of paper and number of photos to be printed on each page. With this software, you can easily print 80 small, index photos on a single piece of letter- size paper.
Other bundled software utilities allow you to stitch together a number of photo shots to create a panoramic or 360-degree view, touch up the photos before you print them and create a 3-D effect to make photos look even more realistic by separating the background and the foreground layers.
A few words on the downside, though. At $275, the printer is not exactly cheap. For real portability, you can add a rechargeable lithium ion battery, but it will set you back another $125. The casing is not really that sturdily built, either. The blue plastic lid feels a bit flimsy, but fortunately it is covered by the printer cover.
Furthermore, the ink cartridges are rather small, so I do believe that you need to always have a spare pair of cartridges for an extended trip -- especially if you expect to be doing a lot of photo printing. And, with the proliferation of Bluetooth devices, I think the usability of this printer would be increased if it were already equipped with a Bluetooth receiver. I also think that a good photo printer should also be equipped with a memory card reader. Unfortunately, these would cause the price to rise even higher.
Despite all of this, however, the level of portability and the great performance may make the printer worth its price.