Not everybody needs the extra functions provided by an all-in-one printer. Single-function printers, without integral scanners, are a bit smaller and a bit cheaper, and Canon's PIXMA iP4500 comes in with a street price of just over £60.

Decked out in Canon's standard silver and gloss black livery, the printer has more of a square-cut look than recent models. It supports two paper sources: a 150-sheet cassette which loads from the front and a 150-sheet tray which folds up from the rear. Many people will load the cassette with plain paper and pop 15 x 10cm photo blanks into the rear tray, as and when they need to print photos.

Physical controls on the printer are few, with buttons for power, paper feed and paper source. Everything else is handled through software and Canon bundles Easy PhotoPrint EX and a labelling applet with the machine. The labelling software is designed to handle direct printing on CDs and DVDs, and a disc tray is provided with the printer. This slots in behind a fold-down flap, once you've folded down the paper output tray from the printer's front panel.

There are no memory card slots in the PIXMA iP4500, but you do get a PictBridge socket so you can connect a digital camera directly. This is a good compromise, as there's no display to select the images to print.

Print speeds vary from a quite acceptable 9.5ppm for a straight text document, through just over 4ppm for a mixed text and graphics one, to 2.3spm for duplex. This final double-sided print test took over eight minutes for 20 sides of text, as the printer pauses noticeably before starting the second side of each page.

Printed output, from the five separate ink cartridges - three colour and two black - is better than good. The one-picolitre ink-drop size, an industry best, produces some very fine detail and also enables smooth colour variations in photo prints. Plain paper text print, using the pigmented black ink, is clean and shows little noticeable ink run. Dye-based black ink printed over coloured backgrounds runs a little, but the effect is not that noticeable.

We managed to find a good, cheap source for the five ink cartridges the PIXMA iP4500 uses, which gives running costs of a smidgen below 2p for ISO black text and just under 4p for colour. These are both very good figures for an inkjet, nearer to those often seen with colour lasers.

If you don't need the extra facilities of an all-in-one printer, this is a very good single-function machine at an impressive price. Single-function in this context means no scanner, but you can still print on plain paper, glossy photo blanks and CDs and DVDs, so it remains a versatile proposition.