Digital Camera Blog

Canon Pixma iP8500 Printer

Canon has never been a company to sit back on their laurels when they have a really great product. So I was interested when I heard that they had upgraded their line of inkjet photo printers and now offered eight-color printing on some models. Since I had been really happy with the results I had been getting from their six-color printers I really wondered just how much better it was possible for the new printers to be.

Dual paper tray
The first thing I noticed when I unpacked the Pixma iP8500 was that this new printer has two separate places to put paper. Up on top it has the expected place for a stack of printer paper up to 8.5 x 11 inches in size. But there is also a second tray that pulls out from underneath the printer in front and also can handle paper up to 8.5 x 11. I think this is a really great feature since it lets me keep two different sizes of paper in the printer or lets me keep two different types of paper loaded. In my case I chose to use the top bin for ordinary printer paper for proofing and everyday text printing needs, while I put Canon??s glossy photo paper in the tray under the printer. Switching from one feed to the other is as simple as pressing a button on the front of the printer. I will admit to having some trouble figuring out how to set the paper guides and load the paper in the lower tray. I found the drawings on the tray and the information and drawings on the quick start guide confusing, but after some false starts I just put the guide away and studied the tray until I figured out how to load it on my own. These instructions could stand some clarification.

But that??s a minor glitch and only held me up a little while in getting the printer up and running. And I am getting ahead of myself, because before loading paper it makes sense to load the ink cartridges. As with other Canon printers, the printer head with its 6,144 discrete nozzles is a separate part and must be put into the carrier inside the printer before loading the ink. The fact that the printer head is separate is important, because this means you can easily replace a damaged print head without having to send the printer anywhere for service. I must point out, though, that I have never had to replace a print head on any of the Canon printers I have used over the years.

Anyway, once the print head is put into place the eight separate ink cartridges are snapped into the appropriate slots one at a time until all eight have been loaded. Why eight? Original color printers used four colors of ink, the same four as in standard four-color printing like that used to produce this magazine. This is called CMYK, for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK. When Canon upgraded to six colors of ink they added a lighter Cyan and a lighter Magenta, called Photo Cyan and Photo Magenta. These additional colors of ink improved the rendering of subtle colors and shades. With CMYK printing, you get red by using equal parts of Magenta and Yellow, and to produce green you use equal parts of Cyan and Yellow. This works pretty well for most reds and greens, but some shades of these colors are difficult to reproduce accurately. For this reason, Canon has added Red and Green inks to the previous six colors. Will future printers have even more colors of ink? In commercial printing some fine art printers have used 12-color offset printing, so we may at some point see photo printers offering more than eight colors. But for now we have eight colors in Canon??s ChromaPLUS inks, and that seems to be plenty. Having each of the eight colors of ink in a separate cartridge prevents waste, because you are only replacing empty cartridges, not throwing away cartridges with some ink still in them.

Hassle-free printing
After installing the print head and inks and loading paper into the printer I did not connect it to my computer immediately. I remembered that for many printers it is important to install the printer driver before hooking up the printer. I also remembered that printer drivers are often updated and so I went to the Canon web site and downloaded the most recent driver for this printer. I installed that rather than the one on the CD that came with the printer. Once the printer driver was installed I connected the printer to my computer with a standard USB cable, then made my first test print. As expected, everything worked flawlessly and no tinkering was needed to get things working right. That??s the way I like my computer peripherals, with no hassles at all. A 4 x 6 borderless print take about 21 seconds to print. You can print with borders or borderless in several print sizes. You can also print on both sides of paper that is suitable for this.

Over the month that I was testing this printer I made more than 100 prints and the only times I had any problems were when I did something wrong. I tried printing images with lots of reds and greens in them and compared them with prints made on my earlier six-color Canon printer. The differences were subtle and more visible in some prints than in others, but the prints from the iP8500 were definitely superior. Flesh tones were particularly good. I really loved the ability to switch quickly from one paper type to another, and for some of my work I loaded 4 x 6 glossy photo paper into the lower tray and was able to switch from one size to another in a matter of seconds.

In addition to printing from a computer, the iP8500 also has a PictBridge port on the front for direct connection to cameras. This allows you to print directly from cameras, both still and digital video, that support the PictBridge feature, without the need for a computer.

Canon Pixma iP8500 Bubblejet Printer
Price: $349.99
www.canon.com