Canon S4500 Colour Bubble Jet Printer

Richard Price
19 June 2001

The new Canon S4500 is an affordable A3 colour printer that, with a few optional extras, turns into a scanner.

The printer is Mac and PC friendly and comes with built-in parallel and USB ports.

It's a pity that no printer cable is included, but any USB or IEEE 1284 cable should do the trick. The installation process is straightforward either way. Install the software, plug in the printer and you are ready to go.

The S4500 comes with two ink cartridges including printheads. The black cartridge (BC-30e) contains the black ink tank. The colour cartridge (BC-31e) has three separate ink tanks for cyan, magenta and yellow. I like the idea of separate tanks as the colours can easily be replaced individually when they run out.

The S4500 has a print resolution of 1440 x 720 dpi and even on plain paper (64 - 105 gsm) the two cartridges included with the printer produce impressive results.

Photo realistic results require the optional BC-32e PhotoRealism cartridge (RRP AU$89.95) and some high quality gloss paper.

The Canon S4500 uses a 6 colour PhotoRealism system. The PhotoRealism cartridge contains 3 low-density inks in separate tanks (black, magenta and cyan) that replace the dedicated black cartridge. Yes, the printer has to be opened up and the cartridges swapped around. Together with the existing colour cartridge, these low-density inks help produce finer graduations and smoother tones. Replacement tanks for the PhotoRealism cartridge cost AU$18.95 (RRP) each.

Even without the PhotoRealism cartridge the photograph I scanned (using the scanning cartridge) and printed out on glossy photo card impressed the people I showed it to.

Other functions help maximise print quality and compensate for defects, while Canon's image optimiser technology smoothes the jagged edges of images downloaded from the Internet.

A dual print head system and bi-directional printing (it prints in both directions of the print-head movement) helps speed up printing. Speed varies depending on the job, but the printer is capable of churning out 6 A4 colour pages per minute. The separate black cartridge means black and white printing is quicker at about 9 A4 pages per minute.

Turning the printer into a scanner is a little more complicated than the quick start guide suggests. Again the printer has to be opened up and the black cartridge replaced with the IS-32 scanner cartridge (RRP AU$138). Scanner driver software included on the installation CD also has to be installed

The test machine I looked at did not come with a printed manual. While an on-line reference manual is available on the installation CD in PDF format, it is not the user-friendliest document I have seen.

It took me a while to realise that the scanning holder the manual refers to was in fact the clear plastic sheet with white backing paper included with the scanning cartridge. Unfortunately, the scanning holder was only A5. Bigger sizes are optional extras.

Images can be scanned directly from twain compliant graphics software. So I fired up PhotoShop 5.5 to scan and capture an image.

The S4500 scans at 720 dpi and reads up to 256 monochrome gray-scale levels and 24-bit colour.

Unfortunately, in the same way printers do not print all the way to the edge of a page, it is impossible to scan a complete A3 page in scanner mode. Having to slip the image into a holder before scanning is also a bit of a nuisance. The scanning software interface is not very appealing either

It's an optional extra I can do without. Flatbed scanners are cheap these days, offer a much better resolution and usually come with better software.

But don't be put off! The S4500 produces professional colour prints that should appeal to any desktop designer who wants to break out of the confines of A4 proofing.

Price AU$699
www.canon.com.au

By Richard Price, Editor, EnergyME.com

For information on getting a product reviewed email richard@energyme.com