Canon S800 Ink Cartridges

PC Magazine gave it their Editor's Choice award making the Canon S800 a photo printer to consider. Its print speed is just one feature that the editors and end-users like. That print speed is rated by Canon at 1 minute for a 4" x 6" color print or 2 minutes to print an 8" x 10" color print. That speed is partly possible because the Canon S800 ink cartridges eject ink through 1,536 nozzles.

With the speed comes print quality. The Canon S800 inkjet cartridges print at a resolution of 2400 x 1200 dpi for both color and black and white. Using an ink tank configuration designed just for photo printing, the Canon S800 ink cartridges number six instead of four with cyan and magenta included. Handled media includes letter and legal size, envelopes, A4, A5, 4" x 6" and banner paper.

Connectivity is via USB and IEEE 1284 parallel port. OS compatibility includes Windows 95/98/2000, NT 4.0 and Mac OS 8.1 and later. Bundled software includes PhotoStitch, which allows the user to combine photos into panoramas and PhotoRecord, which allows for organizing and archiving.

PC Magazine's editors found the S800 to be a great deal faster than most other printers in its class. On the other hand, PC World found that the Canon S800 inkjet printer produced text documents at only 2.4 pages per minute. This is a common complaint with Canon photo printers. They also found the print quality to be inferior to the S600, a less expensive printer. Most end-users find the print quality to be very good.

The Canon S800 gets similar reviews as other Canon photo printers. Quality and speed are generally singled out as great features for image printing. The recurring complaint is always the text printing speed. PC World did not even like the quality of the text.