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There's no shortage of printers under £50 these days, many housing built-in scanners.
Canon's new budget model, the Pixma IP2500, lacks a scan function but is surprisingly good at photo printing.
The shiny black casing gives a good first impression, although it doesn't take long to work out this printer is a budget model.
There's no memory card reader or LCD screen and, thanks to the lack of an output tray, prints simply get spat out onto the table, or possibly the floor. Canon has done a good job of making it compact, though, sitting just 237mm deep.
The printer is served by two cartridges - one containing dedicated black ink, the other a three-ink colour cartridge. The black cartridge (PG-37, £8.99) is rated at 220 pages when printing text, while the colour (CL-38, £11.99) is good for 205 pages or 120 6x4 photos.
High-speed printing is unlikely to be top of your list when opting for a printer in this price bracket, but Canon says the Pixma IP2500 is capable of spitting out 22ppm (pages per minute) of text. You might get near this in draft mode, but real-world speeds are much slower.
In our tests, with 10 full pages of text, we only achieved just over 9ppm, with a 20-second wait for the first page. Meanwhile, a 6x4 photo on glossy paper at the highest quality settings took one minute 30 seconds while an A4 version left us waiting just under four minutes.
When printing on glossy photo paper, quality is excellent for such a cheap printer. Look closely and you'll see fine detail missing and some speckling, but colours are both vivid and realistic.
Canon's Pixma IP2500 might not be the fastest, but at this price it serves well as a budget home printer and is perfectly capable of outputting decent photos.
See also:
A range of powerful features makes the Photosmart Pro B9180 a force to be reckoned with 06 Dec 2006
Want to print pages bigger than A4? Canon would like you to consider the PIXMA iX5000 26 Oct 2006All Inkjet Printers Tags: Compact Photo Printer, Canon
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