Canon S820 Bubble Jet Photo Printer
May 2002
Fast and Accurate Digital Photos
By Collin Keefe
Inkjet printers are the most popular devices for making digital photo prints, yet many inkjet printers are so slow your coffee gets cold waiting for the photos to come out, and when they do they look like experiments in pointalism.
We tried out Canon's new S820, the younger sister to the S820D. The new one lacks the memory card slot and LCD adaptor form the previous model, but maintains its die hard photo performance.
Like all the inkjet (Canon calls them bubble jet) printers from Canon, the S820 comes with six separate ink cartridges (cyan, photo cyan, magenta, photo magenta, black and yellow), which is a really great feature. Since printing photos will most likely deplete your cyans and magentas long before tapping out the yellow and black, having your ink palette broken down like this saves you from costly and wasteful ink cartridge replacement. If one color runs low, you simply replace just that one color. This six-color process, along with Canon's MicroFine Droplet technology, which Canon says applies a greater number of ink droplets that are smaller, more consistent and more accurate than standard inkjet printers, gives your printed image superb resolution up to 2400x1200 dpi with up to 49 gradation levels. Zoinks! Plus, outside of the digital photo arena, the S820 is quite capable of handling color graphics and straight up black text too.
Canon's driver software works like a charm. It's smart enough to know to switch up the printer's settings when you select what kind of document you want to print—i.e. a book report, an itemized income tax form or a photo of you and your main squeeze sunning it up on a beach in the Bahamas. And while the software takes a lot of the guesswork out for you, it's also liberated enough to let you go in and tweak its settings to meet your own personalized needs. An added bonus is the bundle of software. Canon gives you PhotoRecord, ZoomBrowser, ImageBrowser (for Mac users) and PhotoStitch, which lets you build panoramas from your images.
One thing we found that would've made a really nice touch was if Canon had included a fully printed version of the S820's manual. Suffice to say, we figured the thing out with just the Start Here leaflet and the truncated Quick Start Guide. The S820 is very simple to use. Just a touch of good karma and a little trial and error, and you've got it licked. Still, knowing a little more going into it would've put our minds at ease.
After getting our S820 loaded up on the six pack of ink that came with it, we connected it, calibrated it and were ready to roll. We started off with images at 1280x960. As the first few prints slid out onto the S820's output tray, we were immediately swept up in a maelstrom of giddiness. At 4x6, our prints (which only took about a minute to execute, by the way) were really something to behold. The colors were vivid, the images were crisp and much to our surprise, the S820's results really were almost as good as something you get back from a 1-hour photo processor. At 8.5x11, we found the printed images' skintones looking a little bit like a corpse after the mortician's makeover, but with some minor adjustments in PhotoShop, we were able to get healthy looking results even with such relatively low-resolution images.
While computer stores are loaded with good inkjet printers for about $100, the S820 is worth the extra attention for its excellent six-color cartridge system, fast printing speeds and intuitive software.
By Collin Keefe
Inkjet printers are the most popular devices for making digital photo prints, yet many inkjet printers are so slow your coffee gets cold waiting for the photos to come out, and when they do they look like experiments in pointalism.
We tried out Canon's new S820, the younger sister to the S820D. The new one lacks the memory card slot and LCD adaptor form the previous model, but maintains its die hard photo performance.
Like all the inkjet (Canon calls them bubble jet) printers from Canon, the S820 comes with six separate ink cartridges (cyan, photo cyan, magenta, photo magenta, black and yellow), which is a really great feature. Since printing photos will most likely deplete your cyans and magentas long before tapping out the yellow and black, having your ink palette broken down like this saves you from costly and wasteful ink cartridge replacement. If one color runs low, you simply replace just that one color. This six-color process, along with Canon's MicroFine Droplet technology, which Canon says applies a greater number of ink droplets that are smaller, more consistent and more accurate than standard inkjet printers, gives your printed image superb resolution up to 2400x1200 dpi with up to 49 gradation levels. Zoinks! Plus, outside of the digital photo arena, the S820 is quite capable of handling color graphics and straight up black text too.
Canon's driver software works like a charm. It's smart enough to know to switch up the printer's settings when you select what kind of document you want to print—i.e. a book report, an itemized income tax form or a photo of you and your main squeeze sunning it up on a beach in the Bahamas. And while the software takes a lot of the guesswork out for you, it's also liberated enough to let you go in and tweak its settings to meet your own personalized needs. An added bonus is the bundle of software. Canon gives you PhotoRecord, ZoomBrowser, ImageBrowser (for Mac users) and PhotoStitch, which lets you build panoramas from your images.
One thing we found that would've made a really nice touch was if Canon had included a fully printed version of the S820's manual. Suffice to say, we figured the thing out with just the Start Here leaflet and the truncated Quick Start Guide. The S820 is very simple to use. Just a touch of good karma and a little trial and error, and you've got it licked. Still, knowing a little more going into it would've put our minds at ease.
After getting our S820 loaded up on the six pack of ink that came with it, we connected it, calibrated it and were ready to roll. We started off with images at 1280x960. As the first few prints slid out onto the S820's output tray, we were immediately swept up in a maelstrom of giddiness. At 4x6, our prints (which only took about a minute to execute, by the way) were really something to behold. The colors were vivid, the images were crisp and much to our surprise, the S820's results really were almost as good as something you get back from a 1-hour photo processor. At 8.5x11, we found the printed images' skintones looking a little bit like a corpse after the mortician's makeover, but with some minor adjustments in PhotoShop, we were able to get healthy looking results even with such relatively low-resolution images.
While computer stores are loaded with good inkjet printers for about $100, the S820 is worth the extra attention for its excellent six-color cartridge system, fast printing speeds and intuitive software.
Companies Mentioned:
 |
