November 12 - November 19

Canon Bubble Jet S450 by Alessandro Cancian Choosing a printer is no simple task. Several factors need to be considered: price, print quality, speed but also and many forget about this maintenance costs. Ink jet printers represent one of the cheapest solutions in terms of purchase price, and some models can boast a really interesting print quality. Unfortunately their negative point is their maintenance. Those who have to run a small office, like myself, or students who need to present their reports to school, must change the ink cartridges quite often. However, it frequently happens that a cartridge needs to be changed simply because only one of the colours has run out. A waste, no doubt. The simplest solution would be to separate the tanks so that one would only need to replace the empty one. This is the idea Canon followed with its new Bubble Jet S450. Conceived for the SOHO (Small Office Home Office) market, the S450 sports a very practical and functional cartridge loading system which makes the separate loading of the four ink tanks (Black, Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan) very easy. Equipped with serial as well as USB ports, the S450 is compatible both with PCs and with Macs. Installation is definitely easier and faster than unpacking the product. The $249 (CDN) printer is a well-rounded product, thanks to its high monochrome print quality (text dumping) coupled with a nice speed, although far from the 10 pages per minute boasted. Compact in shape, the S450 honourably defends itself also in colour printing, even though I never managed to get the 7 ppm declared by the manufacturer. Quality maintains good, especially when one wants to use the highest resolution possible for the Canon printer (1440x720 dpi). With the S450, Canon is also offering some bundled software that will give your presentations a professional look. In summary, the new S450 is a product that will valorize your work, saving you considerable sums. For further information, please visit www.canon.ca

 

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