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For me speed of image printing is secondary to quality, in fact providing the quality is there I am not fussed about it at all, so when a printer gives excellent quality as well as speed it’s a bonus and the Canon i865 gives both.

The unit 42x31x31cm with paper inserted in vertical stack at the back of the unit. Paper is stored face up and is delivered face up out of the front of the unit. There are only two switches on the unit, on/off and eject paper.

This is a four ink printer with five cartridges. Before you all go mad trying to work that out there are small cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges as well as a small and a large black. The two blacks enable the faster printing of text documents.

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The claimed printing speeds on an inkjet are never achievable so if you want to know what is claimed go the Canon site. In printing a 200 word document a number of times I managed 12PPM, the quality of draft mode was grey rather than black but would probably do for a memo. Printing a real 1500 word document over four pages produced figures of 9PPM. If you print in normal mode then text quality improves and or course speed of throughput decreases.

This is an image printer and here it excels. One of my test pages is made up blocks and shades of colours as well as text and inverted text of small sizes as well as lines to show equality of spatial movement. This is a very complex page and printing it in best mode of glossy photo paper took only 2½ minutes. I suppose the average for other printers in the same price bracket would be around 5 minutes, some have taken vastly longer. However speed is very definitely secondary, I only care about quality and this was excellent. Having fast output was only a bonus.

The i865 can print borderless up to A4, an adapter is supplied to allow A5 (postcard size) sheets to fit over the A4 store and while this is a little fiddly it works well. I produced A5 borderless prints in less than a minute, this is very close to the speed claimed, I just wonder why the text print speed figures are always so ‘optimistic’.

It is claimed that you can even print directly onto CD’s and DVD’s I have used other printers that can do this, I did not test the claim with this unit.

The reason for the excellent image quality is 2pl micro nozzles, not long ago 10pl was state of the art. 4800x1200dpi also no doubt has a big effect on the quality.

While all inkjet printers must have the ability to print text I would not buy this unit as a text printer. However as an image printer it is excellent and must go onto your short list probably very near the top. The best street price is around £155.

Link http://www.canon.co.uk/For_Home/Product_Finder/Printers/Bubble_Jet/i865/