Buying a printer is far more tricky than buying a PC, as most PCs will do most jobs, but printers tend to be more specialist, so they'll do some jobs well and other jobs poorly.

If you spend over £200 on a printer you can buy a good all-rounder, but under £100 there isn't the budget for all the technology that the manufacturers would like to include, so they are forced to make choices.

The Canon i320 is a small printer with unusual styling that offers a quick and cheap way to rattle off acceptable text prints. Photo print quality is fair to middling, and the i320 is limited in the weight of paper that it can handle, so you're best not thinking of it as a photo printer.

Then we had the Canon i450 which uses a far smaller ink droplet than the i320, and that makes a significant improvement to print quality. The i450 is very good at printing text and perfectly OK at photos, but there are definitely better photo printers on the market. None of them can do borderless printing as well as the Canon, however.

The Epson Stylus C62 was a decent enough little printer, but the Canon i320 beat it in every respect. We were impressed by the Epson Stylus Photo 830U which used a six-colour cartridge plus a black cartridge to achieve very impressive results when printing a photo. Text quality was of average quality so the 830U is best used for photo work.

The Lexmark P706 was supposed to be a photo printer, and it gave you the option of a photo cartridge or a black cartridge. The snag is that photo printing was unimpressive, and the speed was atrocious.

Finally, Lexmark's Z605 had the novel feature of drivers that talk to you, but it also managed decent, crisp monochrome text printing. Colour printing was less special, and in many ways the Lexmark Z605 was very similar to the Canon i320.

If photo printing is your thing we suggest you buy the Epson Stylus Photo 830U, but for a decent all-rounder that is particularly good at text it has to be the Canon i450.