New printer, you wonder why anybody would ever buy a printer that costs more than the i320! On paper, at slightest, it claims to be able to “print professional quality documents and photographs at 2400 x 1200 dpi, with a high printing speed of 10 ppm .” in addition, “this printer is also equipped with a full speed USB 2.0 interface .”
As far as normal print quality is concerned, this is indeed good. As for photos, however, you’d better print them only infrequently. Photographic paper doesn’t come cheap, the inks are expensive, and the ink droplets are visible. As for speed, true, the i320 is fast, but let’s not exaggerate. At standard decree, it runs at around six pages per minute.
But wait, as the saying goes, we’ve saved the best for last. The i320 is “a full-speed USB 2.0.” Oh yeah? If you think that because your PC is USB 2 well-matched, the i320 will work faster, you’d be wrong. Let’s not puzzle USB 2 full speed printers with USB 2 high speed printers. The manufacturers are happy to maintain this bewilderment, of course, but only high velocity printers can take advantage of the fast new 480 Mbits/sec border. The USB 2 full speed buffer only guarantees compatibility with the new average. Data transfer still takes place at the same old speed as for the USB 1.1, namely 12 Mbits/sec. So, to put it directly, the i320 is just a USB 1.1 printer, the same as the rest.
First Impressions
The casing is surely original, but the mechanics of the printer are not. Under the hood, the engine is very like to that of the earlier S300 model. Print speed is almost identical, and like the S300, the i320 is powerless of printing A4 size right to the edge of the paper, without a margin. Just as with the HP, you have to reconcile for a 4 x 6 inch (10 x 15 cm) format without a margin.
Another responsibility of the i320 is that it is rather noisy. Here, the paper feed system is as guilty as the print head carriage. This is not serious in itself, but since we have tested silent printers previously (the S750, i550, etc.), we have become used to the luxury of silence and are getting picky.
The Tests
We carry out all the usual tests: printing text and composite documents in monochrome and color, in standard and coarse resolution, high meaning, etc. All the tests are portray here in detail.
Calculating the Cost Per Page
We were very surprised when we performed this calculation - and this is the printer’s main disadvantage - because, according to our capability, printing with the i320 costs more per page than it does with the S300, S330, etc., yet it uses the same cartridges and print heads! We couldn’t believe it, so we do the test again, three times, but there was no question about it.
We wasted three sets of cartridges drama the tests three times and getting the same result each time. Weird! Was there something wrong with the model we tested? We only had one i320 available, so we weren’t able to try the experiment using a new peripheral so as to evaluate them. In any case, even though the difference is major, amounting to five otherwise six cents in color and one cent in black-and-white per page, it isn’t catastrophic. The i320 remains within the average cost per page for all inkjet and bubble jet printers, but this cost is twice that of Canon printers with separate ink tanks.
As a reminder, the cost of black-and-white printing and color printing per page is assessed on the basis of ink coverage of:
(1). 10% black per page for monochrome;
(2). 5% per color (5% black, 5% cyan, 5% magenta, 5% yellow) per page for color.
Speed Test Results
The i320 runs at the same speed as the previous model, the S300. As a general rule, with an output of nearly six pages per minute, it’s two times as fast in black-and-white as in color, and it produces 4 x 6 inch (10 x 15 cm) photos in less than two minutes. These speeds are fairly similar to those of the slightly more expensive S330 and the C62 from Epson. The comparable HP inkjet printer in a similar price range, the Deskjet 3820, is slower.
Print Quality
In general, the sort of people who buy this type of printer do so because they want an inexpensive peripheral that is able to print everything, and even produce reasonable photos. The i320 will meet their needs. As long as you don’t press your nose against them, the photos that it prints are quite acceptable. To be more specific, the colors are very bright and attractive, but the photos are as grainy as those in which the sensitivity has been pushed to the limit, as if the camera were set permanently to 400 ISO. Of course, the graininess is linked to the ink droplets that are slightly too large to be invisible. On the other hand, as long as the print heads are correctly aligned, the horizontal lines are well concealed.
As for text, the rough mode is more gray than black. It can be used to check the layout of a document or to speed-read a printout of a Web page or a note, but it won’t do for printing professional-looking documents. This is best done at default resolution, which produces text approaching laser quality. The black is deep and the letters are correctly shaped and have no particular defects. There are three faults that we noticed, however. In graphics, large expanses of black are not uniform and characters printed on color backgrounds are less legible. As a last complaint, it’s hard to work on both sides of the paper manually because the ink penetrates the paper too deeply. In comparison with its rivals, the i320 performs just as well as the HP Deskjet 3820 and better than the Epson C62 .
Then it’s up to you to not depart it lying around, beyond in a corner, because the print heads could become blocked if not used. So, don’t use it too much, but don’t stop using it altogether, otherwise the print heads will clog. In any case, if you only intend to use it infrequently, if it needs to be installed, for example, on top of the PC at your country retreat, it might be worth bearing in mind either an HP or a Canon. HP printer ink is extra expensive, but the turn out heads are an necessary part of the cartridges, so if they become stopped up you just have to restore the produce head and the printer will work like new. This is not the case with Canon, where the print heads are part of the printer mechanism.
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