I Dare You to Compare to a Real Film Photo
Written: Mar 25 '05 (Updated Dec 13 '05)
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Pros: Deeply saturated colors, fast printing, quiet.
Cons: Higher price. Software could be better. No included cables
The Bottom Line: Highly Recommend. Fabulous photos, good speed, easy to use, never misfeeds, nice options.
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| glenhamilton's Full Review: Canon PIXMA iP8500 Printer |
Update.... After over 8 months of regular use, we still love this printer and it has performed well. Photos look as good as the first ones we ever printed. We've gone through about 1,000 prints now. We mostly use generic ink.
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Since most people buy an inkjet printer to make color photos, I will focus this review on that purpose. It’s the one aspect of printing where a printer’s ability will show through. I think it is fair to say that most any inkjet printer is going to do a good job printing text and brochures. I don’t bother to list all the specs that you can find anywhere and you likely already know or you wouldn’t be looking for opinions.
Size, Weight, Space
My first impression of the printer was quite positive. Like most, it is a bit “Boxy” looking, but Canon has given it a glossy black stylish look. Yes, it is mostly plastic, but what isn’t plastic these days. My last Canon printer was similar in construction and lasted through 3 years and over 3,000 photos. It was still running ok, but I wanted to upgrade to a quieter, faster model with better options and photo quality.
The printer footprint is not large, so it takes up only a little desk space. It is light, yet also stays in place and doesn’t scoot around when printing. I have gotten to like the flat top surface as I often put paper or other items on topic. Many printers have a slopping surface, which looks cool, but not space efficient.
Software
The included print manager software is a weak point in my opinion. It does the job reliably, but the user interface sucks. Canon has used the same clunky design for more than 5 years with little or no updates. I even saw that a couple of their software files on the CD was from 1998. My example of “clunky” is that you can create a “profile” with custom print settings that you want for a particular printing situation, but once you create it, you can’t go back in to edit the profile. You have to delete it and create a new one. There are several of these annoying nuisances. I still can’t figure out how to change the default settings without need to reselect it every time I start Windows.
The printer comes with a variety of other photo enhancement and management software that I would consider to be decent included software, but the features are usually limited and you get the bare minimum of features that you are likely to need. I removed their software after installing it and experimenting with it. I like the Jasc Photo Album software better (used to be called ImageExpert).
Printing Results
This printer is very quiet. About the only thing you hear is the print head carriage switching direction at each end of the printing stroke. You certainly won’t hear it outside the room, and likely someone could be sleeping or resting in the same room without being annoyed by the printing.
Speed is great. This is the one area where printers continue to get better year after year. In my tests, a 4” X 6” high-resolution photo took an average of 30 seconds. A 5 X 7 took about 45 seconds, and an 8 X10 is barely over two minutes. That’s 3 times faster than the Canon inkjet printers of 3 years ago. For the first time, I did not have to wait on the printer. It was spitting out photos about as fast as I could decide which ones I wanted to select from my photo Album.
Paper handling has been superb. In printing 400 photos thus far, no misfeeds, no paper handling issues.
Photo quality is superb. The extra ink cartridges allow for much deeper primary colors. Everyone that viewed my photos were convinced the prints came from a photo lab. You just have to see prints to believe it. I printed a few photos from both my existing 4-cartridge Canon to compare against this new 8-cartridge version. When viewing separately without comparion, both copies look fabulous, but when placed side by side, it is easy to spot the superior differences in this printer.
Ink
Some information I mention here is independent from this printer, and the comments can apply to most any inkjet printer. This is the most important consumable item to consider when buying supplies. You can have a great printer, but if you get poor quality inks (or paper), your color might be unbalanced, photos may not last long without fading, and potential clogging or other issues could occur with your print head. People get confused about several aspects related to ink. I read a review on another printer where the user made a buying decision on a brand of printer based on the ink. They bought an Epson because Canon did not supply 75-year inks! There are several things wrong with that decision. Long lasting inks can be bought for any type of inkjet printer if you are willing to pay the extra price. This is not a reason to decide which printer to buy. Secondly, you probably won’t be concerned if your photos last 75 years. You’ll be dead. Your children will likely not even be using photo albums, but use media centers or other devices to display photos. The one reason why you might be interested in long life ink is if a photo or sign is intended to be constantly displayed in bright ambient light or sunlight. Many inks fade over long periods of time when exposed to ultra-violet light (directly or indirectly from sunlight). However, most inks (even the cheap ones) I have experimented with over a couple of years showed almost unnoticeable fading. Ok, so maybe you have to reprint your photos in 10 or 15 years. There’s no telling what sort of superb printers will be available by then. Don’t get all hung up about the longevity of the ink.
The second big decision point about ink is whether you want to keep the number of cartridges to a minimum, such as with a 4-cartridge printer, or something like this 8-cartridge printer. No, an 8-cartridge printer doesn’t necessarily use more ink or cost more. Surprisingly, I’ve noticed that this printer uses about 20% less ink than my prior Canon inkjet that had only 4 cartridges. Part of the reason is that printing heads have gotten more efficient and absorption characteristics (paper quality) of papers have changed. The decision really comes down to whether or not you want true saturated blue, green, and red colors. This is the reason for the added cartridges. Of course you will be buying more cartridges of various colors, but buying less often.
For my printing needs, I’ve found that the best combination of price/quality has come from a place called PrintPal. My last order was $4.95 per cartridge, plus an extra 10% discount and free shipping. Thus, $3.55 is a big difference from the $12.95 in most stores, and I usually get them in about 4 days. Don’t get suckered into the comment from printer manufacturers that you need to use their brand of ink. You can get superb brilliant photos with generic brand inks at much lower price. Buy twice as much photo magenta and photo cyan ink as other colors. These colors run out much faster than other color cartridges.
Paper
As with ink, this is an important factor that will determine photo quality. A fair portion of the cost per photo will be determined by how much you spend on the paper. I’ve tried lots of different paper from many places. I stick with brand names where I can be sure to still find them at a variety of stores once I settled on a particular brand. You don’t always get what you pay for with paper. I was surprised that one of the worst papers at a higher price was Kodak! Now you would expect that maybe a 100-year-old photo company would know something about photo paper… nope! Some of the better papers I’ve found were ones from Office Depot and Office Max. Also, it seems that Canon has gotten aggressive on their pricing lately. The cheapest price of paper I found in Office Depot was the Canon brand. I bought a pack of 120 sheets of 4” X 6” precut photo glossy paper for $15 on a bi-yearly sale. Normally the price is about $25 (21 cents per print), which is still very competitive for a high quality paper.
When buying paper, pay attention to the thickness of the paper and make sure you stay within Canon's recommendation if you don't want paper feeding issues (true of any printer). There are various thickness available. In general, anything in the 12 mil range should work fine.
PictBridge Feature
A popular new feature appearing on many printers is the ability to connect a digital camera directly to the printer and print photos without need of the computer or software. You can use this feature only if your camera also supports the PictBridge protocol (most due since 2004). Then you have to deal with the clunky interface of selecting your images from the camera controls. It sounds like a nice selling feature, but in my opinion, it is a solution looking for a problem. In reality, you will want to crop images, and perform brightness or color corrections, etc. After you waste time and money printing photos that don’t look the way you want, you will start up the computer and use a software application to make your selections for printing. Furthermore, you will want to save your images to computer anyway for later printing. I’m sure there must be some occasions where this feature comes in handy, but I haven’t found it yet.
Double-Sided Printing
This is a neat feature you might use occasionally if you don’t forget it is there. It is the ability to more easily print double-sided documents without having to go through several manual processes of flipping and reinserting paper.
Borderless Prints
I printed a couple hundred of these. It is a nice feature but I can see evidence that some ink is wasted. It prints farther beyond the paper edges than is necessary. It’s only by a few thousands of an inch, but still enough to waste ink. After printing 10 photos, I placed a paper towel against the “overflow bin” and noticed the towel because saturated with ink that went into the tray instead of on the paper. I’m now debating whether I want to continue using this feature or to leave a border. This could be an nice easy alignment feature for Canon to add in the printer manager software, but since the interface has basically gone unchanged in 5 years, I won’t bet that it this will be included any time soon.
The only other negative comment I bother to mention (other than outdated print manager software) is that no USB cable was included. Come on Canon! I buy those things for for 32 cents each in smaller quantity than Canon could buy. Some customers will be surprised to open the box and expect to print right away. Nope, back to the store to get a cable. This is a lame brain marketing decision to leave out an important cable just to save a few cents. It’s a black eye on an otherwise spectacular product.
Summary
This is a printer I would buy over and over again.
Superb photo resolution and color.
Good printing speed.
Easier method of double-sided printing.
8 individual ink tanks (deeper saturated primary colors)
Two paper feeds (top and tray).
PictBridge support (do you really need it?)
No included USB cable. (Canon, what were you thinking?)
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 318
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
glenhamilton
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Member: Glen Hamilton
Location: Northern California
Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 15 members
About Me:
Engineering Executive (electronics and software)
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