Canon i550 Color Bubble Jet Printer Review

Cheap Refills, No Banding, No Waiting

Canon USA's top-of-the-line i850 is a terrific printer -- a fast four-color model whose prints match six-color dedicated photo printers', but with superior performance for everyday applications. But while its $200 price would have seemed a steal two years ago, it seems a hurdle today, with deluxe inkjets like Lexmark's Z55se or HP's Deskjet 5550 selling for $100 to $150.

What if you like Canon's style -- especially its thrifty use of separate rather than combined color ink cartridges, so you needn't throw away ink when one color runs dry, as with most affordable printers -- but you want to stay south of two C-notes? You do what we do here: check out Canon's next best personal printer, the i550, priced at $150 (or $120 after a mail-in rebate through February).

Though Canon touts its "Advanced Microfine Droplet Technology," the i550 doesn't match the i850's ultra-tiny, 2-picoliter ink droplets, so -- as with other brands -- its ability to aim color ink with 4,800 by 1,200 dpi resolution doesn't guarantee better results than 2,400 dpi inkjets. (Indeed, the 5-picoliter Canon prints black ink at a perfectly adequate 600 by 600 dpi.)

But its 1,088-nozzle printhead does offer ample precision, with noticeably less banding in colored areas -- even in its speedy draft and everyday modes -- than rivals we've tested. And its support for borderless color printing makes it a tempting alternative to a dedicated photo printer; it lacks digital-camera memory-card slots, but comes with software that reads Exif image data from cameras' JPEG files for optimized image output.

The USB- and parallel-interface-equipped i550 is no desk-space-saving compact; it measures a substantial 16.5 by 10.8 by 6.3 inches when closed, then becomes positively imposing when opened up, with front and top doors revealing multipart, nested pull-out paper trays. On the positive side, the power supply's built in, so just a thin cord (without external power brick) goes to your AC adapter.

Top-mounted controls are limited to power and cancel/resume buttons flanking a not-terribly-useful status LED (you'll need the manual handy to learn that three flashes mean a paper jam or four mean an empty ink tank).

The rear tray holds up to 150 sheets of paper, which slide through the printer in a nearly straight path and are easy to load -- paper rests on a little ledge, then the carriage tilts to feed sheets through. The system was faultless in our testing, more skew-proof than other vertical-feed printers we've tried. On the minus side, while actual printing is pretty quiet -- or almost silent if you activate an optional "quiet mode" -- the paper-feeding mechanism makes the i550 more noisy than many competitors.

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