Review: Canon i860 Printer

Printers, like monitors, outlive most computers. Because they’re essentially a one-trick pony—all we ask of them is that they print our memos and spreadsheets and now, our digital photographs—they don’t need the latest, most powerful CPUs or gigabytes of memory in order to fulfill their function. They just don’t age as quickly as our computers. But that doesn’t mean you won’t out-grow them.

The Old Printer Was a Dog That Don't Hunt

We bought our last printer, the HP OfficeJet 600—a multi-function unit: printer, scanner, copier and fax machine—in 1997, some seven years ago at this writing. And while it did do all the things HP promised it could do, it did none of them well.

Or quickly.

Or quietly.

And it was not cheap.

And the software it insisted it needed, above and beyond a simple printer driver, brought even sturdy Windows XP to its knees.

Our Specs: What We Wanted a Printer to Do

No, it was clear we needed a new printer and it had to:

  • Print our digital photographs—indistinguishable from the prints you get from a photo store.
  • Print our invoices and promotional materials—with a high level of quality, accurate colors and alignment
  • Be very, very quiet (sorry, Mr. Fudd)
  • Be very, very fast
  • Be inexpensive
  • Play nicely with Windows XP
  • Just work, without us thinking about it—a major tenet of our Transparent Computing philosophy

The Canon i860 does all of this and more. You don’t normally see geeks raving about printers that retail for $149,95, but you’re about see us gush over this little beauty.

We admire good engineering—stuff where someone obviously sat down and thought about how an end user might utilize their product in the real world. Canon’s done that here.

Among the features we like:

  • Five ink tanks—instead of a single multi-ink cartridge for color printing (ever run out of just the yellow ink in one of these guys and have to replace the whole cartridge?), this baby’s got five: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and two black tanks. Just replace the colors you need. Why two black cartridges? The second tank allows this little inkjet printer to create text documents that look as though they’d been printed on a LaserJet.
  • Non-invasive printing—it just works—quickly, quietly and with often amazing quality. The HP used to print our web pages (badly) in about two minutes; the i860 does it in less than ten seconds—quietly and sharply.
  • Optional Easy-WebPrint software—did you ever try to print a web page and have the text run off the right-hand side of the page? The WebPrint software, which sits in a hand add-on toolbar in Internet Explorer, controls how web pages print. Want to print it with the background colors in landscape mode? No problem. Want to reduce the size of that page so it fits on a single sheet? Easy as pie.

If you’re looking for a printer for your home or even small office use, as we were, the Canon i860 is the way to go.

Highly recommended, but, sadly, no longer being manufactured by Canon. We still think Canon makes the best printers out there.

Updated: November 18, 2005