Dylan Tweney of Mobile PC Magazine recently reviewed the Canon i80 Color Bubble Jet Printer and liked it a lot. He said:
Unlike most portable printers, the i80 doesn’t ask you to compromise on print quality. Black-and-white text printouts are clear and crisp…. Text printed on general-purpose paper shows a little ink bleeding around the edges of letters, which gives a slightly fuzzy appearance to very small type and to the edges of bold display type. But when printing photos on photo-quality paper, the i80 really shines.
This printer is really portable, with an optional battery kit that allows you to print a couple of hundred pages with each charge. With the battery, the i80 is just over 5 pounds, without it, about 4.6. (Amazon.com says that the battery kit is for the i70 printer, but Canon’s website says that it works with the i80 as well.)
The only real issues with the i80 are print costs and speed. Everyone knows that printing photos isn’t cheap, and this printer is no different from most. Regarding its speed, Dylan said:
Although Canon rates the i80 at 14 pages per minute for black-and-white text, it delivered only a tenth of that– 1.2 pages per minute in our tests. Switching the printer to draft mode doubled the speed, to 3.2 pages per minute, although draft-mode printouts look a little like dot-matrix printouts….
But, in the end, he really liked it: “At $250, the i80 is a great deal for mobile professionals and photo enthusiasts with limited desk space. The only real downside: At almost a buck a page for full-size photo paper, you’ll need to exhibit some restraint when cranking out those prints or you’ll soon find your paper costs exceeding that of the printer itself.”