Firing with both canons (Canon S 900)

Member Name: GadgetMad

Product:	Canon S 900
Date:	31/07/02 (1761 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent photo quality, Low running cost, Fast print speed

Disadvantages: Average text quality, Slow start up time, Initial capital outlay

Canon have taken the photo quality printer to a new height with the introduction of the S900 printer.

Having owned numerous printers that claim to be both fast, cheap to run and produce true photo quality results I was somewhat sceptical when the S900 was released. Especially as it was over £300. I was searching for a replacement for my Lexmark Z53 (cheap to buy, expensive to run) because it took too long to print an A4 photo (around 12 mins).

The canon offered fast print speed, low cost, individual colour ink tanks and true photo quality. When put to the test it delivered amazing results. True photo quality A4 images in around 2 minutes.

The S900 is a six cartridge printer: Black, photo-cyan, photo-magenta, cyan, magenta and yellow. The driver software will warn when a cartridge is running low and when it is eventually empty you only need change that cartridge. At around £6 from www.7dayshop.com (I'm not connected with them in anyway) this is a cheap printer to run. In contrast, a colour cartridge for my old Lexmark was over £35. This is because the cartridges don't contain a print head. The print head in the S900 is separate and user replaceable.

Paper handling is excellent as it uses the 'straight through' path method as found in Epson and Lexmark printers. Start-up time for the first page can be slow as the printer wakes up (from auto-power off state) and collects information about the paper and cartridges. It also seems to be very tolerant with regard to heavy weight paper and makes short work of Jessops 260gsm glossy photo paper. Even canvas based ink jet paper was handled without problems. Best photo results were achieved with Canons own Photo quality paper. The photo appears to exist underneath the gloss giving an even greater density to the image.

Text quality printing is also good but perhaps not quite as good as other printers when run in the standard mode. The characters tend to
'bleed' slightly and don't have completely crisp edges.

One surprise is that Canon have chosen to only include a USB connection. It is a shame that they didn't include a USB cable in the box. Connecting it to my XP based PC was a doddle and it has proved very reliable over the last two months. In the past I've had problems with Windows 'losing' the connection to a printer but this hasn't happened with the Canon/

In short therefore I would not hesitate to recommend this printer to anyone who wants the best possible photographic results in the least amount of time for the lowest per page cost.

Summary: