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Canon i560 Desktop Photo Printer

Canon i560 Desktop Photo Printer

List Price: $99.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best Printer I've Ever Owned
Review: Just bought this printer (...)(. (...)wanted to give Canon a chance. WOW! is the best word to describe this printer. Used the Canon software to take a Digital still and printed a borderless 8x10 picture on Kodak Glossy paper and the results were unbelievable. It's as if I had it professionally printed! (...) you will not be disappointed by this printer!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent printer for multiple uses
Review: I purchased this printer after reading reviews of similar older models in a magazine. Although I wasn't sure how it would compare, I have been very impressed! The separate tanks for the three colors has already saved me money. I have estimated that the ink costs for me are more than 3 cents/page but certainly less than 11 cents/page. This is from printing both b&w and color items. And I love the fact that it tells you you're running low on a color a bit ahead of when you actually run out.

I have used this printer for a variety of tasks and with several types of papers with no problems or complaints. In addition to general letter printing, I am doing quite a bit of advertising these days. I have used the printer for double-sided brochures with a photo and blocks of solid color. The colors are rich and the borderless printing works great to give a professional look. Printing my own brochures has saved me tons of money. I recently finished preparing a display for an exhibit hall, printing multiple photos of various sizes on a couple different types of Canon photo paper. Excellent! With the Photo Paper Pluss Glossy, they look professionally developed. There are options one can check off to improve image quality and/or photo quality, which do improve the printing of some photos and graphics.

The down side I see for this printer is that it does not accept banner paper. However you do have the option of printing a banner (or poster) on multiple sheets of paper and gluing them together. When done this way, you can give the printer the option of printing crop marks so you know where to cut. Not as good as being able to accept large pieces of paper, but how much should one expect from a printer this size and price? I feel I have really put this printer to the test, and am not at all disappointed in its performance and quality. Buy it if you want nice looking photos, flyers, signs, letters...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: u wont bee dissapointed
Review: I hac an epson color 850 before this--it was much noisier, took 10 times longer to 'warm up. How they make this stuff so complex and sell it so cheep boggles me. Fast, color great. Thus is USB 2.0 ready, I hooked up to a usb 1.1 port, and I don't think it is any faster on USB 2.0 port as far as the printing operation goes, USB 2.0 only speeds up transfer from computer to printer, and that happens very fast on usb 1.1 so no big deal if you arent using a usb 2.0 port.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Good printer wait til Oct 4th to buy and save an extra $30
Review: Excellent printer.. except for some photo paper tray identical to the i860. Actually this print buffer is slightly larger than the i860's.

Almost the same speed as the i860 too for $20 less... plus a $30 rebate starting October 4th...

So if you can hold off until then...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great printer for the price
Review: Just got this printer and I'm printing 4/6 from SONY Digital 8 vidieo camera with still mode/memory stick. I'm impressed with the quality of prints from this printer. The software is easy and it's hard to tell the 4/6 prints from 35mm ones, and the camera is only 1 meg/px resolution. Now I'm thinking of selling my 35mm stuff and getting a higher resolution digital still camera, now that I have a printer that can produce this kind of quality...

Bill

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Unbelievable Photo Quality
Review: To be fair, I don't know how this stacks up against other photo printers, but I was floored when we printed out our first 4"x6" photo. We actually bought it to replace our 15-year old HP, not knowing it was a "photo" printer. It wasn't really even advertised as a photo printer (and I don't know what that means other than resolution). To our surprise, it came with a few photo paper samples and we tried it out with low quality photos and were truly amazed. We primarily use it for regular paper printouts and are also very impressed with even the low resolution. We prefer the individual ink tank system from Canon as well.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Really like my i560
Review: Bought this printer after much research in Sept. 2003. Am very pleased with the results. Have always had an HP, but this switch to the Canon i560 was well worth it. Won't look back to HP.

The setup was easy, even for a non-mechanical type like me ( have Win XP home). The instructions were simple yet clear. The software works, I especially like the Canon Easy Web Print software that is included.

The separate ink tanks are a great advantage and the price of replacement tanks is half that of HP printers. One neat feature I discovered about this printer is you can set your printer preferences to High, Standard, Draft or Custom. I set my default to gray scale, Custom 5...it prints lighter but saves tons of ink. If you buy this i560 don't overlook this neat feature and test out the levels of print quality you can get.

I make lots of cards with photos...and this little printer outdid my HP 932c, noticably. I am impresssed.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great printer for home or students
Review: I recently purchased the Canon i560s printer in September of 2003. The Canon uses 4 ink tanks. As the inks are used up you only need to replace the color that is empty. This is much nicer than many other manufactures' setup where the cyan, magenta, and yellow tanks are combined into one print cartridge. The Canon replacement cartridges are also about half to a third (list price) as expensive as other brands. This could lead to a significant savings over the years and was, in fact, the primary reason I chose this printer.

While the specifications on Canon's web site for this printer list it as having no USB cable included, my particular model did come with a 5 foot USB 2.0 cable. Perhaps that is what distinguishes the "i560" from the "i560s". At any rate, the inclusion of the cable saved me a few dollars and the trouble of getting another cable.

The setup of this printer was a no-brainer. Just had to remove the packing material, install the print head and ink tanks, then install the driver. There is a "quick start" sheet that guides you through all this. I'd expect the average user to be up and printing in about 15 minutes.

The print quality is very good for text and excellent for photographs. Especially good photographs can be produced on the included sample pack (5 sheets) of 4" x 6" Photo Paper Plus Glossy. I would rate the quality of a photo print on par with the pictures you get back with regular film developing. The Photo Paper Plus even has about the same thickness and consistency as that from a film developer. If you take the output from this printer and drop it on the floor a few times, bend it, and wrinkle it slightly, it will be just like pictures coming back from bulk developers. It takes less than a minute (50 seconds in high quality mode) to print a 4x6 print. The colors are as good as I've seen on a 4-color printer and nearly as good as high-end 6-color inkjets. You have the option of borderless printing on any size stock, up to 8.5" x 11"

For day to day printing, back off the printer setting from high quality to either standard or draft. The latter modes print much faster. The draft mode quality is certainly decent enough for printing out email and the like. You'll want to switch to at least "standard" mode for printing out your resume or term papers. I tested a 30 page draft mode gray scale (black only) document and printed it with the following results: Time to start printing first page, 20 seconds. Time to print all 30 pages: 10 minutes, about 20 seconds per page. NOTE: the source for this document included only scanned 8.5" x 11" B/W images on each page, total file size 253MB.

There is a status indicator (in the printer queue status) that shows about how much ink is available for each color, so you'll know in advance when you'll need more. In the print driver you have the ability to set the printer to automatically shut off after several minutes of inactivity (user settable) and auto power on when you print again. There is a USB port on the front of the printer to directly print from supported digital cameras - Canon Bubble Jet Direct compatibles only. This would be handy if you want to print out a quick snapshot without bothering to boot your computer first.

I've seen comments in other reviews that the paper trays seem flimsy. I believe they will hold up fine if not subjected to undo abuse.

This printer was just released so it remains to be seen how it hold up long term. However, it basically is the same as the Canon i550, but faster. I would expect it to hold up as well as the i550. From what I've seen, the i560 is about 30% more expensive than the i550. For that relatively small amount, the i560 is a good investment considering its faster print speed.

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Update:

After a few weeks of use, I have the following comments to add:

Printing a test document that is about half text, half color screen shots, 102 letter size pages took 16 minutes 20 seconds in draft mode. Average speed: 9.6 seconds / page. Text looked fine, graphics are quite readable, but solid colors have a noticeable screen pattern to them. Same document in standard mode took 32 minutes. Average speed: 18.8 seconds / page. Text was very good and somewhat better than draft mode. Graphics were noticeably much sharper. Printing a 8 x 10 inch color photo on plain paper gave the following results: Draft mode 18 seconds, output looks a bit fuzzy (comparable to inkjet's best modes a couple of years ago) also some slight banding. Color is a bit weak, but plenty good for school projects for example. Standard mode took 35 seconds, and was again much better than draft mode. Standard mode skin tones are a bit pink. High Quality mode takes 1 minute 34 seconds per 8 x 10 print. Again, this Canon excels at printing photographs and even on plain paper the output is quite good. By printing on special glossy photo paper, it is as good as I've seen from a four-color printer. Plain paper tends to curl when using it to print photographs.

Overall I'm still very pleased with this printer. Though (as with virtually all printers) the average print speed is much slower than claimed on the box, it's pretty fast for an inkjet. (I was able to get about 20 b/w pages per minute in "custom 5" mode, but the print quality suffers greatly.) For day-to-day printing, I leave the printer in draft mode for speed and ink savings. The above-mentioned 102-page document looked good enough in draft mode for use and as a bonus, draft mode is basically twice as fast as standard mode. I've currently printed a bit over 500 pages (about 20 were large 8x10 inch photographs). When printing photographs, the special photo paper is expensive, but well worth it. The three ink tanks for color are still about half full, the black is just about ready to be replaced. Also, I mentioned above that Canon includes a printer monitor that has a graphic display of the remaining ink for each color. Unfortunately, I believed this was how it worked. In reality, it shows all the inks full until one of the ink tanks is nearly spent, then displays that ink as low level. Upon more closely checking the documentation, it is mentioned that the display will only show when the ink is at a low level.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: I am not impressed
Review: I have used Canon Printers for the past decade and I have always been pleased with their performance. I still have a Canon BJC-7000 that works fine. I got the i560 because it boasts both speed and quality. I wanted speed over quality as I send out 350 newsletters. The reported speed is up to 22 wpm black and 11 wpm color. I bought the line, but figured that the true speed would be half that. It was even less then I hoped for. I printed a 3-page outline in draft mode and it took 18 seconds (6 second per page or 10 pages per minute). I printed the same thing in standard mode and it took almost a minute (3 pages per minute). Next I printed a flyer that had a small color photo and a single graphic. In standard mode it took 90 seconds to print and in high mode it took 160 seconds to print. It was nowhere near the speed promised. On the other hand, text and graphics in standard or high mode are equal to a color laser. I have not tried to print a photograph. I imagine that an 8 x 10 would take at least 10 minutes. I do not know yet if I will return the printer or not.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A great value for a photo and text printer
Review: Just purchased the just released i560 and am very impressed. Set up is a snap (USB cable not included). Has a compact profile and sleek design. Same features as the more expensive and highly regarded i850. Very quick and quiet printing. Text and graphics are very sharp. Haven't printed to photo paper yet, but if it matches the i850 reviews, it should be impressive.

I did a lot of research and was just about set to order the i850 when I discovered this was just released by Canon at [money] less. It's a very good value and has PictBridge for direct printing from cameras (mostly Canon for now)and a nice software bundle. For a mid- to low-price range photo printer, you can't do much better based on my admittedly brief intro to Canon.


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