Canon S200 Bubble Jet Printer

To save any confusion from the beginning, what Canon call a bubble jet printer, the rest of us refer to as an ink jet printer and that is how I will refer to it in the rest of this review.
My reasons for buying the printer were that I wanted something mainly for printing text, but with an occasional picture or photo, in practice I have found I often print out letters and while job searching CV's, it is also very useful for printing out instructions for computer applications and is not to heavy on ink if you use draft mode.

I paid sixty pounds for the printer at the end of 2003, the exact model I bought isn't now available, but the S200x is the new model and seems more or less identical. On a separate note, I wish manufacturers wouldn't change their models so often, usually its more or less just a cosmetic change of dubious benefit, but it makes getting spare parts or new ink cartridges difficult, as the model never gets established.

The printer comes well packed and you should be careful to remove all the tape that has been used to stop its internals from moving about during transit. Putting the printer together is just a matter of clipping on the paper rest and the output tray, the output tray just hooks on the front of the printer and is easily removed when its not in use, which saves a lot of room on your desk.
You also have to install the printer cartridge, this is an all in one system that installs the print head and the the two print tanks, it is just locked in place with a lever, after this you just replace the individual print tanks as needed.
After that it is just a matter of using the supplied CD to install the printer drivers and then connect the printers USB cable ( You have to buy one separately as it is not supplied.) to the computer and Windows should recognize the printer and you are ready to go.

Printing is fairly simple, just choose print from the menu of the application you are using, a box will appear which allows you to set the number of copies, pressing the properties button opens a larger window that gives you the option to set the type and size of paper being used, the printing quality and a few image enhancement features, you are also given access to the printer maintenance screen.

Printing text works well, if the output is just for your own use draft mode is usually quite sufficient, for more official letters the standard setting gives very good results, the print is crisp and clear. The text print speed is quite fast, in draft mode its literally just a few seconds per page, although that is after the printer has finished getting ready, at the start of each printing session the printer will take anything up to a minute humming to itself and whizzing the printhead about before it actually starts printing.

Printing pictures is a very different thing to text and depends on a lot of different factors, just selecting a picture that you find on the internet for example and pressing print, will result in a usually fairly poor print about half the size it showed on screen. I'm not going into the reasons of why this is, mainly because I'm not an expert, but here are a few tips I have picked up.
The printer doesn't come with any proper image handling software, that enables you to position the image on your paper, or to set the images size, preferably telling you the number of dots per inch. ( dpi ) If you have a digital camera it will probably have some suitable software with it, ( I use ArcSoft PhotoImpression, which does an adequate job. ) failing that you should be able to find a good freeware program on the web.
Before printing a photo it is best to enhance it, I use DCE Enhance which is freeware and you can find a link to it on the Graphics and Photo page of my web site, it is a fairly simple program that does a good job just using its defaults, as well as the standard settings I usually just lighten the picture a bit, if it is a photo taken with a digital camera, as they often seem a little dark once printed.
The canon printer driver has a vivid colour setting which can improve the look of some pictures, but it is a personal preference
Don't try to make the picture too big on the paper, keep an eye on the dpi value, about 150dpi seems to be about the minimum that gives a reasonable picture.
If you want a photograph quality picture you need to use good quality paper and remember a picture on the monitor will always look better than a printed picture, where any minor faults or fuzziness will stand out clearly, so don't expect a poor picture to print well.
The Canon can print a photo almost to the quality of one produced by a film processor, but it depends on how good your digital camera is and also the skill and experience of the operator, as it takes a lot of time and practice to produce good prints. I have seen top quality photographic prints produced from a computer printer, ( Albeit a better one than mine.) but these were by a colleague who was very keen on photography and spent a lot of money on it.
Personally I still use one of those throw away film cameras if I go on holiday, as the results are far better than I could produce and it is probably cheaper, as printing on the computer uses the ink at a tremendous rate and good paper is not cheap either. You also need quite a bit of patience with the computer, as a high quality 150cm by 100cm photo takes about five minutes to print.

One of the main reasons I chose this particular make and model of printer, was because the print refills are relatively cheap and all the printer reviews I had read in magazines said that the ink runs out pretty quickly with inkjet printers. I found that the black ink lasts quite a while, especially if you use draft mode a lot of the time, but the colour ink runs out very quickly, as it is a combined tank containing three colours the capacity is very small, usually the blue (cyan) runs out first, but that will depend on what colour you use the most.
I have bought a replacement black tank which worked fine, but when the colour tank ran out I decided to try a refill kit. You can only generally use a refill kit if your ink tanks aren't chipped and its worth asking about this before you buy the printer as it gives you an extra option. Chipped tanks are supposed to give you a more accurate reading of the tanks contents, but I found the simple counter used by the Canon driver was pretty accurate anyway, so chipped tanks are probably just a way of forcing you to buy expensive branded ink tanks.

Refilling ink tanks is pretty easy, depending on the model it is generally just a matter of injecting a little ink into a hole in the top of the tank, if its a combined tank make sure you get the right colour in the right hole, you can tell by looking underneath at the exit pad for the ink. Refilling can be a bit messy, so do it on the kitchen table with a bit of newspaper down to catch any spills and a bit of tissue paper to hand, after use wash out the syringe and needles with water, ready for next time.
One thing you will notice when refilling a combined tank is how some colours are hardly used at all, just taking a few milliliters to refill them, even the empty colours take very little ink to refill.
I have used the ink refill kit I bought about five times so far and there is still plenty of ink remaining in it, when you consider it only cost about fifteen pounds, its quite a saving.

The printers reliability has been very good, the only problem I get, is that there can be long gaps between my use of the printer, of up to a couple of months, this can give a problem with the ink drying out in the heads and not feeding through to the paper. ( This occurs with any ink tank and does not seem to be a problem linked to refilling, in fact there is a warning on the ink tank packaging to use it within six months of opening.) This can be cured by going to the printer drivers maintenance screen and selecting deep cleaning, this usually does the trick, if it fails try removing the problem tank and standing the bottom in about 5 millimeter of hot water, or inkjet cleaning fluid, for a few minutes, replace it and run deep clean again.
(Note: Although I have used this method successfully several times, you do this at your own risk, I accept no responsibility for problems.)

So in summary the Canon is a pretty good buy, its fairly cheap and the proper ink refills are reasonably priced, plus you can refill it yourself. If you intend it for mainly text printing you should be very satisfied, for the odd photographic print you will be reasonably happy, once you find some better software, but if you intend to print lots of pictures you would probably be wise to buy a more advanced model. But taken as a basic cheap printer it does a pretty good overall job and is much cheaper to run than the equivalent printers from Lexmark, HP and Epsom.

Rob Goldfish Web Site

Copyright 2005 Rob Goldfish.