Canon i250 Inkjet Printer

Summary: The Canon i250 is a great little printer.

Why I bought it

I bought this because I have had no end of trouble with my current Epson C60 printer. The Epson kept clogging and needed endless nozzle cleaning which churns through the ink. Probably more than half of my ink was going on cleaning and the Epson cartridges are amongst some of the most expensive around. When the colour cartridge ran out, I saw that I could get a new Canon i250 for less than the price of a pair of Epson cartridges!

Installation

First up, this really is a budget printer, one of the ways they have saved money is that there is no usb cable supplied! My guess is that a lot of stores make more on selling you the cable than they do on the printer, so make sure you don't pay too much for the cable.

I am running OS X and OS9 on a 2001 Imac (the last one before the LCD screen came out). Installation was really easy on OSX and on OS9. It was simply a matter of getting the latest driver from the Canon website. Even though the machine didn't mentionrunning in classic, it does, but with a few problems. The most annoying was that the printer kept reporting errors, usually if I had been using it in OSX followed by classic. The workaround I found was to make sure the printer was turned off, then boot into classic, then turn the printer on. I haven't had any problems since adopting this routine.

I also run Yellow Dog Linux. I haven't yet been successful in getting it to run. Because it is a new printer, I haven't been able to find a linux driver for it. It seems that there are no printer drivers and you have to use turboprint.
[EDIT: Drivers now available try the Canon New Zealand site.]

The Verdict

Quality

The output is excellent. I've used the printer for images and text and the reproduction is very good. It might not be high quality enough if you are doing a lot of photo printing, but I found it to be quite acceptable.

Speed

OK, this is one area where the printer isn't all that great. It is quite slow, especially if you start pushing up the resolution. It is considerably slower than the Epson C60. Printing normal text it is ok - especially if you are just doing a couple of pages, but you might want to consider a faster printer if you are doing lots of printing and speed is important.

Ease of Use

Very easy to use. Its small - which is a big bonus. It fits on the desk without getting in the way. I've got heaps more room now that the Epson is out of the way. Its got a neat flap which folds down to keep dust out of the mechanism. Much better than having to keep taking on and off a plastic cover (which the cat liked to chew).

One problem is that there is no tray to catch the paper. I thought this wouldn't be too much of a problem (and it isn't really), but it means that you have to make sure there is nothing in front of your printer (hard for me because I am fairly messy). If there is, your page is going to go scrunch right into whatever is in the way!

The drivers for the mac are really very good. They are easy to use and allow a few extra features like printing multiple pages to save papaer - e.g. 2per page, 4 per page. Apart from problems using the printer in classic mode (see above) it runs fairly smoothly.

The printer utility that comes with the printer is quite good. It allows you to clean the print heads, check the ink levels, and reset the ink levels - very important for refilling cartridges. Its nice to be trusted with this facility rather than have a computer chip refuse to print any more pages because it thinks that the cartridge is empty.

Replacing Cartridges

I finally ran low on black ink, so I decided I would refill the cartridge using a Calidad refill kit. It was a bit tricky getting the cover off the cartridge, but once that was done, it was easy to refill. It wasn't really messy at all and everything seems to be printing well.

Conclusion

A budget printer yes, but I think itis a really excellent printer for the price. Its main drawback is that it is a bit slow, but it has great print quality, is small and has reasonably priced replacement cartridges.

Copyright © 2003 Peter Neish.