Our first printer is the smallest by a considerable margin, and it is shaped much like a beige plastic bread bin with blue ends. Happily its looks grow on you, but at first sight it comes as a surprise.

Installation is as easy as you would expect. Run the set-up CD, connect the USB cable and you're ready to go. Flip down the front cover of the i320 and the carriage moves to the centre. Insert the black and colour cartridges and you're done.

The i320 has speed ratings that are quite low compared to a number of the other printers in this group, yet somehow it didn't work out like that in our testing. The i320 can take 10 or 15 seconds to start printing (we used to call it spooling) but once it's going it nips along at a fair pace.

Text quality is quite acceptable, but it's far from perfect and you can see it is feathered if you look closely. Similarly, picture quality is decent but imperfect. The colours are good, but the transition from one pixel to another isn't as smooth as we would like. The clue here is in Canon's technical specifications where it states that the i320 has ink drops that are 5 picolitres in size, which compares with 2 picolitre drops in the more expensive i450 model.

On the other hand this printer managed all our tasks more than adequately, and it is a very good compromise between speed and expense. Note that it can't handle paper over 105 grams per square metre, so you're limited to regular paper about the weight of photocopy paper.

Canon is significantly different to the other manufacturers in that it sells printers which have replacement cartridges that are merely containers of ink. The others sell cartridges that also carry the print heads. Of course this means that the heads are renewed regularly, but it makes the Canon cartridges much cheaper. Unfortunately they are also quite small, so the cost per page is very similar to the Epson and Lexmark models.

If you print relative few pages, the i320 could be ideal as it costs very little to buy, and when you do buy the occasional cartridge it will be quite cheap. The fact that the printer is small and fast and produces pretty good quality output is a pure bonus, of course.