Canon Pixma iP100 review

The Canon Pixma iP100 is a portable photo printer that can also print text documents. It will print on paper from business card size to A4, and comes with a large battery for travelling.

It's not cheap, but we think it offers excellent quality, and is a rare find in a market churning out photo printers that just print 10 x 5 inch photos.

Excellent photo printing

We'll start with the text printing. We expected document printing to be an afterthought, but it was fantastic for such a small printer.

Text was crisp and presentable even down to 4-point font size and put much bigger units to shame. Printing is a little slower that on bigger machines around the same price, but not so slow as to be inconvenient.

Two sheets of our standard test document printed in 20 seconds. The photo-printing side is equally impressive. Our test 10 x 15cm print was done in 53 seconds. The skin tones, contrast and details were all very good. The battery is fine for 300 prints, which seemed generous to us.

Superior build

The build quality is up to Canon's usual high standards, and the control panel only has two buttons, which will suit people who just want a photo back with no fuss.

The printer has two USB ports, one for printing from a camera via a cable, and one for connecting with your Mac. There's no Bluetooth connection in the box but a dongle can be bought to enable it.

The only niggling omission is the lack of camera-card slots or LCD, let alone an LED. For a printer designed for travelling, these features would have been handy. Just remember to pack your camera's USB cable.

Overall, we really liked this printer. It performs well enough to be either a desktop or portable printer. The speed and build are great and printing is superb for both photos and text. A rare gem.