The Canon i450 costs twice as much as the i320 and it is significantly larger. Its looks are also an acquired taste, but where we took to the cute i320 we never quite managed to find the i450 attractive. It's not exactly ugly, but you may want to carefully consider whether you'd want it sat on your desk.

Technically, however, the i450 is a marvel. It uses the same cartridges as the i320, yet it has far smaller ink drops and it is rated nearly twice as fast as the i320. We didn't see that sort of speed increase in testing, but we were deeply impressed by its print quality.

Text appeared sharp and clear, and the characters had clearly defined edges. This was true on both plain and coated paper, so the i450 would be ideal for printing business letters.

Canon can sometimes be accused of flooding the paper with ink to speed up the printing process, but that certainly isn't the case with the i450. When we printed a test photo, colour quality was a little variable with some shades appearing better than others, but overall the quality was very good.

The most impressive feature was borderless printing. This requires the printer to blow-up the image and attempt to print to the very edge of the paper. In the case of the i450 it did exactly that, and we have no idea how it managed to hold the paper so accurately.

This is a relatively expensive printer, but if you can stand its looks it should reward you many times over.

Company: Canon

Contact: 0870 608 8833

Company: Canon

Contact: 0870 514 3723

Company: Lexmark

Contact: 08704 440 044

Company: Epson

Contact: 0800 220 546

Company: Epson

Contact: 0800 220 546

Company: Lexmark

Contact: 08704 440 044

Tags: ink cartridge seiko epson printer universal serial bus hardware peripherals lexmark inkjet printer