The six-colour Canon i900D photo printer is smartly designed, and it's versatile enough for serious home digital photographers.If you print a lot of 4x6 photos and need a quick, versatile photo printer, you can't beat the Windows- and Mac-compatible Canon i905D. If 4x6 photo printing is not necessarily your thing, or if you don't care about features, such as a mini LCD panel or direct-from-the-camera printing, you can save around AU$200 with the Canon i865, which offers excellent text printing as well.
This smart-looking, two-tone, silvery-beige and dark-grey plastic printer sells for about AU$599. Anyone with a PictBridge-compatible digital camera or camcorder or other Canon Bubble Jet Direct camera can begin printing pictures simply by connecting their camera's USB cable to the direct-print port on the i905D's lower-front panel.
The two card-reader slots in the centre of the i905D's main control panel present a secondary straight-from-the-source printing option. These slots accommodate most of the popular camera memory cards. (You can also purchase a special adapter for more-esoteric camera-card types, such as xD-Picture Card, Memory Stick Duo, and mini-SD Card.) Once a camera card is placed into the appropriate slot, matching green lights appear on the card reader and the i905D's control panel. Photos from the camera card then appear on the printer's mini LCD panel. From there, a quick scroll through the settings menu via the round-buttoned control panel offers paper type, photo size, and various photo-quality printing options. Finally, when you connect the i900D (via USB only, unfortunately--no FireWire) to a computer, the printer assumes the role of a camera-card memory reader, and it's able to preview, print, or save photos to the hard drive from the camera card.
Adding to its overall value, the i905D comes with a generous range of software that includes programs such as PhotoStitch, Easy-PhotoPrint, PhotoRecord (PC only), ZoomBrowserEX (PC only), Easy-WebPrint (PC with Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6 only), and ImageBrowser (Mac). A one-touch press of the PhotoViewer button on the printer sends images from the camera card straight to the computer screen. Want to quickly save those pictures to your hard drive? Just hold the PhotoViewer button on the control panel for three seconds, and, voilà, the data from the card is instantly saved to a folder on your computer's hard drive.
In our Labs speed tests, the i905D printed an 8x10, colour test photo on Canon Photo PaperPro in 2.7 minutes per page (mpp), a tad slower than the 2.0mpp taken by its less-full-featured sibling, the Canon i960, but quite a bit faster than the 5.3mpp of the slightly more expensive HP Photosmart 7960.
All of its features would be moot if the i905D's print quality wasn't of an equally high standard. Fortunately, the i905D's print quality is very good. Our test photos, printed out via default settings only, were extremely detailed, sharp, clear, and colourful. Our only complaint is that the i905D has a tendency to over-accentuate the yellow end of the colour spectrum.
Canon i905D
Company: Canon Australia
Price: AU$599
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1800 021 167
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I have the Canon i865 and your comments in your Canon i905D are spot on! I use it mainly to print CD and DVDs and it's the most advanced printer on the market. (As is the i905D and it's sister printer the Canon i965).
The main thing is that when you compare purpose built CD and DVD printers that sell for around $3,000 the Canon printers leave it for dead in DPI specs.