Canon S200SP
Canon's S200SP is a relatively small standard sized inkjet printer that weighs in at 2.4Kgs. Of interest in the portable category is the fact that both the paper in and out trays are fully removeable; if your space was at a particular premium, you could forgo the out tray especially if you had a flat surface for your finished prints to fall on. With the paper tray installed the S200SP can hold 50 sheets of paper, which should be enough for most mobile printing needs.
Setup of the S200SP was the usual printer affair; good documentation, quite well laid out, and we still hate the fact that virtually nobody ships a printer with a USB cable supplied. For what it's worth, the S200SP is USB only, with drivers for Windows 98 and better and Mac OS 8.6 and higher.
The S200SP also boasts a high resolution print head - up to 2880 x 720 dpi if you want to go into photo printing with it. From a mobile standpoint that makes it somewhat attractive if you need the extra printing grunt. Like our other semi-small model, the Lexmark Z25, the price you pay here is the bigger impact on your travelling bag; the S200SP weighs in at 2.4Kgs, around the same as many notebooks.
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Introduction |
In terms of print speed, the S200SP got off to an impressive start. It managed to spit out its first greyscale page in 25 seconds every time, around five seconds quicker than any other printer in this roundup. From there, however, things slowed down quite a bit. Canon claims 5 pages per minute black; we managed just under 2.5 copies of our test print within a minute. Switching to colour printing, it managed to send out two pages of our document in colour. The quicker initial printing could be useful if you do print a lot of individual pages however.
One thing the S200SP did manage was quite good page quality at a relatively low price. Our test document had areas of bold and italic text, and these came through very cleanly in both colour and greyscale. Canon rates the black cartridges that the S200SP uses as capable of up to 1,550 pages in super economy mode. While we didn't have any unpublished novels around that we wanted to print, that's still fairly impressive.
One thing that does endear the S200SP to us is the relatively low cost of replacement cartridges; a replacement black cartridge will set you back around AU$14, while a colour one runs to AU$36. Given that the low-end printing market runs almost exclusively on the margins that can be made on ink, it's nice to see a printer that still has cheap ink to complement a budget entry price.
Canon BJC-55
Company: Canon Australia
Price: AU$159
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1800 021 167
7%
3%
my BJC-55 just can't print in color with my Nokia 9210. I'm using Canon Bubblejet (BJ mode) driver.