Alternatives to HP: Canon S520 and S750

Speed Results

Speed-wise, the S750 is invariably faster than the Deskjet 5550. The S520 was not far behind: it only loses out to the HP in draft mode. And this despite the fact that both of the Canon printers we were lent suffered from the same defect: they both paused when used in default resolution. But only in default resolution - the other modes went off without a hiccup. Happily, however, it seems that Canon has detected this defect in their lab tests on other models and discovered that it only involved pilot products sent to the press. And indeed, no reader has yet told us of having encountered such a problem.

In short, the S520 and S750:

• print equally fast in color and in black and white;
• print a single page twice as fast as the Deskjet 5550;
• print a 10 x 15 cm photo in a little over one minute.

Note that, of the 48 inkjet printers tested in two years, the S750 is the fastest of all to print the first page of a document (11.9 seconds), and in draft mode. In photo mode, only one printer worked faster than it did, and that was the Canon S630, which the S750 replaces.

In spite of their very good performances, both printers fall down heavily with the defect mentioned above. We found that, out of ten pages, they accumulated pauses of one minute in monochrome mode and 40 seconds in color. If the models we tested could have saved this time, we should have found the following results:

Be that as it may, the Deskjet 5550 only turns out 3.8 pages/min in both monochrome and color.

The Score

Canon, 2 - HP, 0