Canon Sets Trend In Speed, Versatility

Illawarra Mercury

Monday July 2, 2001

with CAMERON BIGGART

STOP and think for a moment, if you will, how often you have ever wished that you could print out the large glossy artworks that you create on your PC, but have been limited by the A4 page size that your printer could handle.

Canon's new S4500 A3 printer offers you the possibility of printing up to 6 pages per minute in colour and up to 9 pages per minute in black and white with a swag of features that make it almost irresistible at the price.

The first and most obvious advantage is that you can print A3 sized images. However, there is also the option of printing on special banner paper rolls that allow for prints of up to six A4 pages in length.

There is also plenty going on ``under the hood" that the average user would not even be aware of but gives the S4500 the leading position amongst printers of its class.

One complaint that many people have had about ink jet printers in the past is that the ink runs out too quickly and that they get no warning that it's about to run dry.

With the Canon S4500, not only are each of the ink tanks separate within the print head so that if one colour runs out you can replace it singly, rather than replacing a tri-colour cartridge and possibly wasting the unused ink in it, but the software driver monitors the ink status to give an ``ink low" warning when you are about to run out. Each of the tanks is transparent so you can also visually gauge just how much ink is left in them.

There are also a number of ``artistic" effects built into the print driver including the ability to turn a colour print into a ``sepia" looking mono print automagically and a filter that ``posterizes" the picture, adding huge amounts of sharpness and edge definition to make a colour pic look like a hand-drawn illustration.

The S4500 is able to print at such fast speeds because the print process is bi-directional, that is the print head can lay down ink on the paper as it travels both left and right.

In the war between inkjet manufacturers to generate the highest possible quality output for users, Canon have come up with ``Brilliant Colour" inks that are specifically designed to give better colour and crisper edges on plain paper, as well as a high density, high speed black ink.

Of course as with many of the Canon inkjet printers, the S4500 can also have an optional scanner cartridge fitted in place of one of the ink tanks so that it can then be used as a scanner for capturing images and text from single pages into your PC. You can also use the scanner head for reading in documents to be sent out via the fax function of your modem.

Just so the Mac users don't feel left out the S4500 is equipped with both a standard parallel port connection for older PCs as well as a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection for newer PCs and Macs.

The Canon S4500 is priced at around $700.

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