The S600 was a great printer, and the S630 may even be better. Its qualities are just as good, with a printing speed and print quality level never before achieved by Canon.

More specifically, it has the same head blocks and cartridges as the S500, and its cost per page are very much the same.

The results give us a cost of $437 at 3000 pages. This implies that although it costs more in the shop, the S630 works out cheaper in the long run. If we assume a daily usage with as much monochrome as color, the S630 will start costing you less than an S300 at around 600 pages (300 color + 300 B&W), or a bit more than the first ream.

Speedwise, the S630 was the fastest printer in the test. Only one could hold up against it - the Epson C80. The S630 was an easy winner of the B&W tests and even more so in the photo tests.

Nonetheless, one of the results was surprising: the S630 is much slower with Windows XP than Windows 98. The speed differences are only noticeable with text documents. Windows 98 gives a motor speed of 33 ppm as opposed to 22 ppm, and in black and white there was a loss of 1 ppm. This of course is due to the driver and maybe to a hidden function which can only be accessed via the Settings / custom button in the Maintenance tab. To display it, press SHIFT and right-click the mouse. A new function is displayed: Stop ink flow between pages. The box is checked, grayed and impossible to activate. The goal is to stop the printer feeding in a new page before the previous one is fully printed.

Advantage: the ink of the first page does not flow onto the second.

Disadvantage: the motor is slowed down considerably.

At the end of the day, the S630 is fastest but the S500, which used to be way behind, is now on its heels. However, note that its driver option is also checked and impossible to activate, though ppm times on the S500 are exactly the same with Windows 98 and XP. Let's hope Canon will soon find us a new version of the driver so that we really get the most out of the printer's potential.