We test drive Canon's smallest Bubble Jet, which retains the series' ultra-portable formula while updating the desktop performance.
Despite the overall sluggish PC market, research companies such as IDC and Gartner have estimated a growth of 2 percent for portable computers over the last year. It appears Canon is trying to corner this market by adding the i70 to its arsenal of portable printers. With a list price of AU$828 (AU$549 + AU$279) for the full package, the i70 does not come cheap. Nonetheless, it does fulfill and exceed the tasks of portable printing.
While it's not half the size of a notebook as the manufacturer has claimed, it still has a very small footprint. It measures a mere 309 x 171 x 50mm! It is furthermore very light, hitting the scales at 1.8kg without the battery. The greenish-silver colour together with the curves combine to create a very sleek frame. To put things in perspective, should the printer be judged for its appearances alone, the i70 comes very close to full marks. Canon's designers definitely wanted to hit a home-run with the design.
The cover for the printer neatly unfolds to become the intake paper tray. This tray should be able to take up to about 30 sheets of plain paper. Any more and you may be subjecting the paper rest to undue stress. There is no output tray for the freshly printed papers to rest, hence we recommend that you leave room for at least three-quarters of the paper media on your desk. Alternatively, the option to support it as it prints is always there. This is especially of importance with regard to A4 outputs on heavy print media. If the media is not supported, bands on the printouts will occur. This is most notable near the end of photo prints where the weight of the media tends to get the better of the paper grips. Due to the smaller form factor, the way the paper feed and paper grips work tend to be more "unrefined". This results in slight scratches near the edges of the paper and is apparent on glossy print media.
The i70 is very simple to install, with the help of the quickstart guide. Everything will move along smoothly if you've already a USB cable. From unpacking the package through to the end of the software installation, a total of only 10 minutes is required. Compatibility is for Mac OS X after v10.1, with more feature support after v10.2 or later.
Setting up the printer for IrDA operation is easy enough, particularly since your IrDA drivers would normally be installed with your notebook. It's basically just a case of aligning the printer's IrDA port to the PC's. Printing from a PDA also requires no prior setup on the printer's side. All you have to do is beam the desired document to the printer's IR port and the i70 takes over.
After setting up the drivers, you'll come across the option of installing the suite of software that comes with the i70. They are Zoom Browser EX, Easy PhotoPrint, Easy WebPrint and the Online manual. The programs that come bundled with the i70 let it function as a photo printer and a quick browser. For users who particularly like doing research through a Web browser, the Easy WebPrint can aid in fuss-free prints of Web pages. Zoom Browser EX and Easy PhotoPrint should need no introduction; they allow novice users to browse their digital images, do slight editing, and of course, print it.
The i70 promises desktop printer performances minus the size. Everything from its claimed print speed to its impressive 4800 x 1200dpi resolution support this fact. In our tests, the i70 proved just a tad slower than our desktop inkjet printers. It does, however, clock in a modest 2 minutes for our 10-page monochrome print test. This puts it pretty much on a level playing field with the all-in-one (AIO) printers.
The i70 produced some of the best text prints we've seen in a while. They were very clean and crisp with a readable font size of 2! Due to the smaller form factor, Canon had to compromise on the ink cartridge sizes. The ink seemed to be different from the normal desktop Bubble Jets as well. In its default settings, the black ink took about 3 seconds to dry and we'd recommend you leave your printed paper for 5 seconds before attempting to touch the text. In our 10-page draft test, no smudging of ink was encountered. However, when selecting normal-quality print options, the speed at which the unit churns out prints appears to be too fast for the ink to dry in its default settings. Thankfully, the Canon drivers have the option of adjusting the amount of ink being applied via the "ink drying time" settings. We'd recommend that users do a trial and error before actually relying on the i70 for consistent text printouts. Should you worry about unreadable text when the ink runs low, you can conpensate then by setting the drying time for longer.
The sizes of the cartridges had a bearing on the feasibility of the i70 as a photo printer. In our tests, photo quality was inconsistent after about three A4 photo prints and four 4R photo prints. While the manufacturer has claimed that the BCI-15 (Colour) cartridge can print 100 A4 colour documents, this figure is a lot less when it came to quality photo printing. It would be fair to say the i70 is more accomplished as a 4R photo printer with the option of A4 photo prints. When the ink runs low, faint red lines can be seen on the photo prints and it is quite noticeable on dull backgrounds. Taking away the capacity of the cartridge as a factor, image quality is on the whole good, recording sharp and vibrant outputs. There is, however, a slight polarisation when working with skin tones, particularly the darker shades.
Unlike Canon's desktop variants, the i70 does not come with the usual Direct Print cable. The i70 uses the bundled USB cable from the digital cameras to communicate. In our Direct Print tests, the i70 was easy to work with and 4R photos were printed in slightly more than a minute.
Regrettably, we were not able to get our hands on the battery pack for testing. The optional pack comes with a cradle and costs AU$279. Yes, the i70 is expensive if intended for a fully portable solution. The manufacturer is claiming prints of 450 pages after a 2 hour charge. We were unable to verify this but it sounds impressive, especially since it reportedly outlasts the ink cartridges by four-fold!
If portable print convenience is one of your top priorities, the i70 is a choice you can't really go wrong in terms of size and print quality. But if you are still very much working from the office, you'd be better off with one of Canon's desktop variants. With the list price at a familiar AU$549, it seems Canon is aiming squarely at the similarly priced HP Deskjet 450.
Canon i70
Company: Canon Australia
Price: AU$549
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (02) 9805 2000
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