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You’ll Never Go To The PhotoMat Again…Provided…Jun 24 '01 (Updated Jun 29 '01) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Truly the most sophisticated and capable photo printer out there in the InkJet market. A professional photographers printer that will make amateurs the talk of the town. $299.
You have a decent digital camera. This is not the review of a digicam though. It’s of Canons new S800 Photo Printer and corresponding technologies. A printer is only as good as the photo it’s printing. So, a good digital camera is a necessity for this photo maker. As digital cameras come of age and flourish in our self-sufficient society, it becomes evident that people want to do it themselves as opposed to having a photo mat middleman. This is where the New S800 Photo Printer from Canon comes in. There are 4 core technologies used today: InkJet, Bubble Jet, Micro Piezo and Die Sublimation (Die-Sub). Side note: The print technology Epson uses was sold to them by Canon back in the 70's. It was called Piezo (PEE AY ZO). Epson has made some enhancements to it and it's now called Micro Piezo. In this review you'll hear me (read me) refer to the S800 as inkjet. It's actually Bubble Jet. Bubbly Jet and Micro Piezo fall under the category of “InkJet” like Porsche falls under the category of Cars. Canon created Bubble Jet by accident. Another story. The basic difference between Bubble Jet and InkJet is that InkJet sprays ink onto the paper whereas Bubble Jet "drips" ink onto the page. Picture a high pressure Spray Can vs. a machine gun Eye Dropper. Epson uses Micro Piezo technology that emits an electronic charge, which fires the ink onto the page. Die-Sub units use a completely different ink process which involves dies that are almost melted/blended into the paper. Consistently the top 3 products in photo printing are from Canon, Epson and Die-Sub units. No matter what you’ve heard about how good HP’s are, Epson's are, Lexmark's are or even Die-sub printers, the S800 will by far be your best bet. There are very few DEDICATED photo printers on the market using inkjet technology and the S800 is one of them. Epson’s 870, 875 and 780 series are a few other dedicated units. But, they’re not as good and I will tell you why. Currently, Epson has lower resolution units out, HP makes their PhotoSmart line and Lexmark just introduced a new Z53. But, out of these, only the Epsons' are dedicated to photos. The S800 is built solely for photos as well. Die-Sub units are also built just for photos. It’s a good thing too because the tortoise and the hare comes to mind when they are speed rated. “Are we there yet?” Die-Subs often only use 3 colors and lower resolution to produce their images, and, 90% of the time they beat inkjets for photo quality. Just not the ones we’re talking about today. Die-Sub is a very controlled, highly accurate image reproduction process that’s just TOO expensive for us average Joes. The S800 print resolution is 2400x1200 dpi (dots per inch) in black and color. Typically, the more dots per inch you have the better your photo quality. But, there are other factors that we’ll discuss as well. Many other units offer 2400x1200 dpi but they have different print engines that place the dots on the paper with less accuracy. Imagine taking a full bucket of paint and throwing it on the wall. You’ve used TONS of paint (dpi per se) but have very little discernable picture quality. Now, take out a paintbrush and go at it using the same amount of paint as before. Same dpi, better Rembrandt. If you’ve got a Jewelry Loop, take it into your local electronics store and look at some print outs close like diamond cutters do. You’ll be able to see the distortion of dots all over the place. Some units like Canons S600 and HP @ 900-1218 series, are 2400x1200 in color and yet only 600x600 dpi in black. Black text hence suffers on these units but provides additional speed at the lower resolution. The benefit to the S800 is that black will be black in its best black suit. The richness of the black on the 600x600 units can only go so deep. Some units use 2880x720 dpi. Mainly Epson. But if you do the math, 2400x1200 dpi provides 2.88 million ink droplets per inch whereas 2880x720 only provides 2.07 million. A 40% increase for the 24x12 compadres. The Canon also uses a true 1200x1200 dpi resolution. What does that mean? Don’t they use 2400x1200? Yes. But, technology itself at the inkjet level has not been able to produce a print engine that can place 2400x1200 dots in an actual inch. So are they lying? No. What most systems do is they do is place 600x600 dpi down first. Then, they go back over that dpi perfectly layering each dot with another layer of 600x600 and then twice more horizontally to get 2400x1200. What this does is it makes those layered dots more vivid, rich and outstanding. But, it doesn’t actually fill more gaps within each inch. The S800 is the only one that starts at 1200x1200 before the layering process begins. And, rather than a 100% overlay, they shift the 2nd and 3rd levels 40% over to achieve more inch-coverage. All your HP’s, Lexmark's, Xerox’s and Brothers use a base of 600x600. Epson’s base dpi is 720x720. The S800 uses truly unique, and patented, star shaped nozzles to fire ink onto the paper. You won’t find them on any other unit. Your traditional nozzle is round and without the proper control is like a faucet without a washer on it – water (ink) goes everywhere or splatters. The star shaped nozzles do 3 things. 1) Because of the design of a star, it causes the other droplets that are laid next to it to link up like a chain and eliminate gaps (“pixelation”) in your document. 2) The star shaped nozzles y also adhere to certain laws of gravity and maintain their shape as the fall from the nozzle to the paper and develop into a perfectly round droplet. 3) Those very same laws of gravity cause the ink to stay centered in the middle of the droplet as its fired so the ink spreads evenly when it does hit the paper. By the way, there are 1,536 of those nozzles firing ink. Over TWICE the amount of ANY other printer I found on the shelf. It’s like having over 1500 people paint your house vs. 800. The job will be done faster with more accuracy and detail. On the S800, a photo of that house will print out in about 2 minutes at an 8x10 size. 1 minute and 52 seconds to be exact. It prints on all types of paper, from plain, glossy, envelopes, transparencies, t-shirt transfers, card stock and even certain thickness of cardboard. Note: you should always buy the brand of paper that goes with the printer. Especially in photo printing. Each unit has a different print engine, different picoliter size, picoliter shape, firing frequency etc. The paper is usually made in the lab with the unit to make sure the print is as good as it can be. I.E. There are many different types of tires that fit on your truck, but do you really want to put Firestones on there? Get the recommended brand. Part of that speed comes from the fact that it’s a bi-directional printer in all modes. It fires ink onto the paper in each direction every time it passes across the page. A lot of units will only operate bi-directionally if they are in draft mode where they can get the most speed. Because they are not dedicated photo printers, they have to slow down at higher resolutions – making a double pass – just to make sure they didn’t miss anything on the first pass. The S800 is like one big car wash. One time through. When printing photos, you need a very small droplet size (picoliter). The S800 and the other dedicated photo printers I spoke of earlier, all have a size 4. Only one other inkjet in the marketplace has one smaller size at 3. But, it’s not a photo printer. Small picoliters are easier to control, provide less splatter, spread more evenly and can be fired in greater numbers. Is it quiet? Your average library is 40-45 decibels. The S800 squeaks at 37 db. in 2400x1200 mode and @ 39 db in 1200x1200. There are other units about this quiet but none quieter. One of the best features of this unit is the Canon Think Tank System. It’s comprised of individual ink cartridges for each color. Each cartridge is expected to go about 200 pages at 11.99 each. The benefit of separate colors is that you only replace the color that runs out. If you photograph skydivers, most of your photos would have lots of blue sky in them. Blue will be your most used color. It will run out before the rest of the colors. Traditional systems have the Cyan, Magenta and Yellow all combined into one cartridge. In that case, if your blue goes, your Magenta and Yellow are wasted because you have to buy a new cartridge in order to get the blue sky to begin printing again. Anyone got $35-$40 I can borrow? The S800 has 6 colors. Not just 4. Black, Cyan, Magenta, Photo Cyan (lighter than regular Cyan) Photo Magenta and Yellow. They say you should be able to print about 120 full color 8x10’s before running out. Six color units surpass 4 color units because they have a greater range of color variations and grayscale capability. When you were a kid, didn’t you want the 64 box of crayons vs. the box of 24? Yeah, so did Canon. Average costs @ 2-3 cents per page in black, 22-25 cents per page in color. Excellent for black text. Among the industry leaders. Better than average for color costs. Die-Subs want your wallet. The printhead on this unit is built to last the life of the unit and should never have to be replaced. If you do for some reason after it’s passed the 1 year warranty, it will cost you @ $80 depending on where you go. The printhead is essentially the piece that holds all six of the ink tanks and communicates with your computer. On a traditional 2 cartridge system (1 black cartridge and 1 color cartridge = 4 colors) the print head is on the cartridge itself. Therefore, as opposed to just buying ink tanks as in the case of the canon, you’re paying for the ink, the cartridge casing and the print head, which communicates with your computer. There’s an optical ink sensor in the unit which most other manufactures have started to use opposed to a ‘dot counter’. The optical ink sensor in the S800 is keen. It fires an LED up through the bottom of the ink tank as the unit is printing. If that LED sees light, it knows the cartridge is empty. Not to mention they are see-through ink tanks, you could pull them out and look at them yourself. Due to the fact the LED is consistently beaming, this system determines your ink level before, during and after printing. So, you don’t have to worry about that 500-page job showing up with 250 blanks. Some mainstream printers are only before and after shots. The Canon will stop and give you an on screen message as to which tank is low or empty. If you want to keep printing anyway, just press the resume button on the top of the unit. The unit does not have a lot of ram in it like some of the HP’s do. You’d think they’d put some in there. They did , 80k. What?!?! 80k?! What's that gonna do. Well, it’s a minor draw back. What the printer does is as opposed to sending the print job directly to the printer; it sends it to your hard drive where the hard drive becomes the printer memory. The 80k is only used to process the information instead of storing and processing the information. The HP 1215 has 16mb of memory in the unit. So if I press print on both of the units at the same time, the 1215 will get the job and start faster (click-to-drag time) than the Canon because there's no middleman. But, because the S800 actually prints photos faster than the 1215, your click-to-drop (from the time you press print on your computer till the time the paper hits the out tray) time could very well be the same or better. There is no page per minute rating on this unit because it’s not a speed printer, it’s dedicated to photos. Canon says it prints 4x6 in under a minute and 8x10’s in about 2. I ran the industry standard text print on it and usually got around 7.7 pages per minute at its fastest rate in black and 4.3 in color. Those aren’t official stats, just what I experienced. I have seen some stores list it at 10 in black and 6 in color. Epson's 870 series and 780 are about this fast as well. Die-Subs go on vacation during the speed tests. As tested by Wilhelm-Research, Canon says if you use their Canon Photo Paper Pro ($13.99 for 15 8 ½ x 11Sheets) with this unit, your photo should withstand fading for 25-28 years. That means it will maintain no less than 70% of its original picture quality before a noticeable difference in color degradation. Keep the photos out of the light in a photo album and expect to see double that fade time if not more. The software that comes with it is cool too. But, I’m not too happy with the ease of use but it gets the job done. The PhotoRecord software allows you to do all the photo editing, album creating, background adding and picture previewing you’d like. It’s just not that easy to use. It’s confusing. The program itself is a little to intellectual for the average consumer. The PhotoStitch program allows you to stitch together old photos and blend them together. NOVEL idea but after blending and stitching, I could still see defined lines between photos. The unit is great. Ditch the software. Hopefully you’ve got something else at home like MGI PhotoSuite 3 or 4, one of Adobe’s products or Ulead’s Photo Impact. MGI 4 is processor intensive though so be careful with that one. The driver setup is nice though. It gives you some basic formatting options and allows you to save your favorite settings so you don’t have to make changes everytime you print. I.E. I print some photos in black and white, so I changed the settings to grayscale, 2400x1200 resolution, a tad bit more black, photo optimizer (smoothes out edges) and photo paper. I then named it BW so I just select that setting when I want to print black and whites and then press print. Most PHOTO printers have this customizable option. There was no particular over saturation of any color during printing. If you see some, there are intensity sliders for each color in the driver setting so you can take 100% of the Cyan out, leave 32% of the Magenta, raise the Yellow from 50% to 71% and so on. They’re all set to 50% default. Inside the S800 box they do give a ZIO Compact Flash card reader and a 4x6 pack of their Photo Paper Pro. The ZIO retails for $40 and the paper is not sold in stores as of yet. Go to the net. So, if you’ve got a digital camera that uses compact flash type I or II or Microdrive, you no longer have to serial up to your computer and wait 10 minutes for all your photos to download. The ZIO acts as an additional harddrive on your computer and you can view all you r photos instantly. The ZIO is bi-directional so you can put photos on it via your computer if you want to take them with you. Its supports Windows and Mac 8.1 and later. USB and Parallel ports. Cables not included. Unfortunately. The warranty is one year. If something goes wrong in that year, Canon will ship you a replacement unit to use while they work on your unit. 2nd Business day. The cool thing is, you get the replacement unit first. You don’t have to send yours back and be down a unit. I know it was super duper long but there it is. A full and thorough over extended education on the S800 and photo printing technologies. And to think I even left some things out. Don’t worry though, if you’re printing with the S800, it will capture every detail. Definite buy.  |
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