The Canon S900 colour photo printer is one of the new, flagship inkjets in Canon's 2002 fleet, and it has the styling to prove it.
But the S900 is more than just a pretty piece of hardware; it also delivers fast yet stunning graphics and photos. With its high price tag, however, the S900 may prove out of reach of all but serious hobbyists who can afford the luxury of a dedicated photo printer.
No experience necessary
Setting up the AU$899 Canon S900 is simple. The illustrated Start Here poster shows you how to hook up the printer to the USB port on your Mac or PC and how to install the cartridges and drivers. Just make sure you have a USB cable; the printer does not come with one. People with older computers are out of luck, as the S900 has no parallel connection. The S900 is compatible with Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP, plus Mac OS 8.6 through 9.x. (You can download drivers for OS X from the Canon Web site.)
The S900's cool, silver-and-smoke plastic exterior houses a printer that's well designed but a tad bigger than your average inkjet: It measures 17.4 inches wide by 21 inches deep by 12 inches high with all its paper trays fully extended. The top-loading input tray holds up to 100 sheets of plain paper, as well as various amounts of envelopes, transparencies, photo paper, banner paper, and T-shirt transfers. The output tray is located at the bottom front of the printer. Open the top of the printer, and you'll find six easy-to-install/remove cartridges: three colour, one black, one photo cyan, and one photo magenta.
In addition to the drivers, the included CD-ROM features ZoomBrowser EX software, for managing stored images, and PhotoStitch, which lets you piece images together to create panoramas and posters. The disc contains the comprehensive user guide, which walks you through the printing process, routine maintenance (such as cleaning the printheads), and basic troubleshooting. The printer also comes with a paper Quick Start guide, which covers everything found in the setup poster and the CD manual but in less depth.
The S900 drivers are sophisticated yet easy to use. In addition to the usual paper-type and print-quality settings, there are automatic and manual colour-adjustment controls, preset photo and illustration effects, and even the option to create banners. You can also print borderless photographs when using Canon's Photo Paper Pro or Glossy Photo paper.
Speedy where it counts
Our Labs' speed tests reflect the Canon S900's strengths as a photo printer. The S900's photo-printing speeds were the best we've seen to date, averaging 1.7 minutes to print an 8x10-inch photo. When it comes to printing colour graphics, the Canon S900 is among the fastest inkjets we've tested; its 1.5 pages per minute (ppm) may not seem like much, but most inkjets print just more than 1ppm. The S900 printed text more slowly, achieving a very middle-of-the-road 3.6ppm. However, because it's designed to operate as a dedicated photo printer, its text speed is more than adequate for the occasional Word doc.
The S900's print-quality scores mirrored its speed scores. The inkjet did an excellent job on our 8x10-inch test photo, rendering a smooth background; lifelike skin tones; and vivid, true-to-life colours. Its graphics samples also looked excellent. Even on plain paper, it did a good job reproducing the smaller photographic elements of our document with minimal visible dithering and handled shading, gradients, and line drawings expertly. Its greens, purples, and blues were slightly darker than those in our test print, but users who are sharp-eyed enough to notice can tweak the precise colour-calibration tools in the printer drivers.
Text quality on Canon's High Resolution paper was also excellent, with crisp, clean type down to tiny 2- and 3-point font sizes. On plain paper, however, text had a slightly fuzzy, oversaturated look to it, and there were some extraneous dots and jagginess, especially on italic fonts. This quality may be adequate for drafts, but for important documents, we recommend using the High Resolution paper or getting a separate printer for text output.
In addition to its outstanding speed and print quality, the S900 is also economical to maintain. Ink costs per page were on the low end of the spectrum compared to those of other inkjets we've tested. The Canon S900 distinguished itself with fast printing and great-looking graphics and photos. It also prints text competently and has an economical ink design. But if you're on a budget and can't afford a dedicated photo printer, Canon's S630 delivers nearly comparable print quality and faster text printing for half the price.
Canon S900 2
Company: Canon Australia
Price: AU$899
Available: 1/3/2002
Distributor: Harris Technology
Phone: 1300 13 9999
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