Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Canon S300 Email This Print This View My Personal Library Heavy Gear January 2002 • Vol.2 Issue 1 Page(s) 19 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Canon S300 Some wannabe computer geeks refer to sub-$100 printers as "toys." Give me a break. Cheap inkjets create eye-jolting photos and decent-quality text for pennies per page. But some folks just can't get past the idea that hardware so inexpensive is really that impressive. The Canon S300 is just another nail in the coffin of these faulty assumptions. For 99 bucks, you get a printer crammed with 2,400 x 1,200 resolution and teensy 5-picoliter-sized droplets. No, this thing doesn't have a parallel port—so what? Let's get with the program here, folks; it's called YOU-ESS-BEE (Universal Serial Bus for those of you still stuck in the '90s). The S300's crowning achievement is its quick-footed photo printing. Full-page (8.5 x 11-inch) photos are done in just three minutes on plain paper. Tack on another minute and a half for glossy-paper images. Colors, predictably, aren't perfect. If you're paying attention, skeptics, here's the big limitation of the S300: photos have too much red in them. That goes for cartoonish graphics, as well, though colors are smoother and still more accurate than Lexmark's cheap printers. My six-page mix of graphics and text printed at a decent clip, too (1.43ppm). And speaking of text, this Canon could school a few higher-priced inkjets. Draft-mode text has some stairstepping and visible ink satellites; that said, this is still some of the most consistent text I've seen from an inkjet. It prints fast, too, at about 6ppm. My last gripe about the S300 is that black ink is pricey: 5.4 cents per page. Color is more reasonable at about 10 cents per page. Yes, Canon stripped down this printer a little to hit the $99 price point. But make no mistake: this printer is not a toy. Ink costs will bite if you start using this printer more than occasionally, so it's best reserved for those whose printing needs are intermittent. by Nathan Chandler S300 $99 Canon (800) 652-2666 (714) 438-3000 http://www.usa.canon.com  User Reviews Be the first to write a review of this product Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.