Dan Littman

Canon i950 Photo Printer

Of the photo ink jet printers we've tested so far, Canon's i950 is easily the fastest. It rendered PC World's test photo, a 7-by-5-inch image, at a jackrabbit pace of 1.5 pages per minute--almost twice the speed of the next-fastest photo printers we reviewed. Setting up the i950 was simple. Canon's driver offers people looking for advanced image adjustments some especially useful features, such as control over each color channel. A "background" feature prints two files, one under the other. With it, you can print a completed form by adding a bit-mapped form template to your Word document. Or make on-the-fly stationery by adding a file containing your logo to your correspondence. The inks in the i950's BCI-6 series are relatively inexpensive: Based on Canon's estimates of page yields, a $12 monochrome cartridge turn out about 1000 pages of text and 770 pages of light graphics. (Printer vendors calculate light graphics yield by figuring that each of the four colors covers 5 percent of the page. Though standard documents for measuring this do exist, many vendors create their own.) Color cartridges can output approximately 336 pages of color before running dry.
Though the i950 flies when printing photos, it delivers text documents at a leisurely 3 ppm (the fastest models we reviewed can print more than 6 ppm). And though we like Canon's full-featured driver, it seems more complicated than necessary; to set up a watermark, for instance, you must work through a dialog box that has three tabs.
The i950 printed glossy photos with fine detail and accurate colors. Gradients and transitions, however, had minor banding. Gray-scale images came close to matching traditional film photos, but they were slightly marred by minor color streaks and had a slightly yellowish cast. We were unimpressed by the i950's text quality on plain paper, too: Though good enough for letters and office documents, output had a grayish cast and a hint of shadowing. On coated ink jet paper, text looked far better. We like that the i950's paper input and output flaps are permanently attached; the clip-on paper flaps that many Canon printers carry fall off too easily.
If you need fast photo prints, consider the i950. In other respects, though, it's merely competent.

Buying Information

Canon i950 Photo Printer 4800-by-1200-dpi maximum resolution, legal maximum paper size, USB 1.1? port, 150 sheets plain-paper input, 150 output. One-year warranty; 16-hour weekday toll-free support. $ 250 4800-by-1200-dpi maximum resolution, legal maximum paper size, USB 1.1? port, 150 sheets plain-paper input, 150 output. One-year warranty; 16-hour weekday toll-free support. http://consumer.usa.canon.com 800/652-2666