Canon unwraps cheap yet sleek printer

Desk space is precious, and you don’t want your surface uglied up with nasty looking printer.

Luckily you don’t have to splash out for a dapper solution.Enter stage left Canon’s new Pixma iP2600. It’s dead cheap at just under 30 quid, but you wouldn’t know it from its luxury looks.The lowdown
Super-budget printers are nothing new, but usually their exterior betrays their cut-price roots. Not so with the Canon Pixma iP2600 – it’s solidly put together and its curvy black shell is devilishly attractive (as printers go). Sure, it’s a little light on some features – there’s no memory card reader or PictBridge for direct printing – but print quality is not to be sniffed at, especially given the wallet-friendly price tag.

Top talents
Speedy printing – When in its quickest mode, the iP2600 can spit out 22 pages per minute in black and white, or 17 if you opt for colour. Not bad going for a budget model.

Sharp print quality – Slow the speed down to the middle mode – about 8.5 pages per minute – and you’ll find the printer delivers nicely dark, defined text on the page.

Rock solid – Nobody wants an ugly, plasticky monstrosity plonked on the desk, and you couldn’t accuse the iP2600 of being anywhere near that. It’s top build quality and looks are about as elegant as a printer can get.

Canon PIXMA iP2600 £29.17 on 18 March 2008.

Closest rivals
Olympus P-S100 – This dye-sub model works with PictBridge, so you can connect a digital camera directly rather than having to print via a PC. It’s a photo printer only, however, so pages of text or graphics are off the menu.

Epson PictureMate 100 – Another photo printer, this model manages to include a small colour LCD display, plus a memory card reader and PictBridge connection for direct printing. Print quality is mighty impressive too.

Epson Stylus D78 – Where Canon has got things right, Epson has slipped up a touch: the D78 looks cheap and emits a fair old racket when it’s doing its thing. There’s no PictBridge or memory card reader either, and speed is only impressive when you kick the print quality right down.

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