Product ReviewsPrinters
The quality of inkjet printers has improved so much over the past couple of years that they're now being taken seriously by some photographers looking for an alternative method of producing colour prints. Canon's S800 is aimed squarely at this market and its output is geared to producing the best possible photographic prints. The S800 is a six-colour device and has separate ink tanks for each colour so you don't have to replace the whole cartridge when one colour ink runs out. However, replacing all six tanks is more expensive than buying a single colour cartridge for other printers. Print resolution is 2400dpi x 1200dpi, producing a density of 2.9 million dots per square inch. Canon's stated figure for print speed is a little over two minutes for an A4 photo. But in our tests, a 36Mb A4 print at the highest quality setting took three minutes, four seconds to print on Canon's Photo Paper Pro. Canon claims each ink tank is good for 280 pages at 5% coverage. The S800 supports paper sizes up to A4 and weights up to 500gsm. Setting up the printer is a doddle with Canon's excellent Setup Guide. Connection to a Mac is, as you would expect, via USB. However, in as with other inkjet manufacturers, Canon doesn't provide the necessary USB cable, which is irritating. At 450mm x 343mm x 208mm, the printer is larger than most A4 inkjets and its method of inputting paper at the rear and outputting it at the front takes up even more space, so bear this in mind if desk space is limited. Images can be printed either from the Mac to which the S800
Printing from the S800 is remarkably quiet and fast: even three minutes for an A4 photo is quicker than most. The results are excellent, particularly when printing photos. Dots are so small as to be barely visible, even at the closest inspection. Colour reproduction is faithful to the original and even the finest detail is reproduced accurately. Canon tells us the results of independent tests show a light-fastness of 25 years (roughly comparable to the latest range of HP inkjets) so, provided you follow the storage guidelines, you needn't worry about your photos fading in the near future. Quality counts The S800's text quality is not up to the standard of more general-purpose inkjets, and EPS files printed from QuarkXPress tended to be slightly over-saturated. But this printer is designed for photographic printing, so to over-stress these minor faults would be unduly harsh. Like all inkjet printers, the S800 works best with the paper designed especially for it. Canon provides A4 samples of Photo Paper Pro. Also included are samples of 6in x 4in Photo Paper Pro with perforated edges. Photos printed on this paper can have the white border removed and are then virtually indistinguishable from prints produced in a high-street lab. We were very impressed with the speed and print quality of the Canon S800, but without testing it in a Labs environment, it's almost impossible to give it the edge over its competitors. Unfortunately, Canon couldn't provide an S800 in time for our inkjet printers Labs (6 April,2001 p66). Any print quality and speed advantage it has over its nearest competitor, the Epson Photo Stylus 890, is marginal and there are no major feature differences other than the separate ink tanks. So at £130 more expensive than the Epson, the Canon is difficult to recommend. That's a real pity, because it's a great photographic printer that produces excellent results. NEEDS: Mac OS 8.1 or higher, 10Mb RAM, 30Mb free hard disk space, USB port HELP: One-year warranty By Kenny Hemphill
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