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WHAT'S HOT: On glossy paper the S820 captures a striking degree of detail and gives photos lifelike lighting, texture, and color. It uses six inks--standard cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow, and black, plus pale shades of cyan and magenta that help capture subtle details. We were pleased with the S820's color graphics and photos, even those printed on ordinary paper. And it prints gray-scale graphics as duotones; that is, it blends a bit of color into the black ink to give the resulting pictures subtlety and depth. Each ink comes in a separate tank that you can replace when it's empty, avoiding the expense of replacing the whole set.

WHAT'S NOT: The S820 printed black text at a painfully slow 2.4 ppm--less than half the average speed of recent ink jets. Text output has a rough, chunky texture, and the black looks somewhat pale. To be fair, Canon never intended the S820 for use as an ordinary text-printing machine; the company doesn't even provide a performance specification for text. Still, the very low cost of black ink--only 1 cent per page, cheaper than the consumables cost for most laser printers--makes it hard to give up on the idea. Color print jobs run an ordinary 14.3 cents per page.

WHAT ELSE: The S820's driver has essentially the same features as the S520's driver, including a window for setting each ink color's saturation individually, and the ability to print full-bleed--that is, to blow up an image so that it prints all the way to the edge of the page. The package includes two Canon graphics utilities: the PhotoRecord image database, and PhotoStitch for combining adjacent photos into panoramic images.

UPSHOT: Homes and small-business users who want high-quality color documents and photos--and who don't print much plain black text--will find the S820 very useful.

SUMMARY

Canon S820 Photo Printer Rated 2 ppm photographs (text and graphics not rated), 2400-by-1200-dpi maximum resolution, 100 sheets input, 50 output. $299 800/652-2666 consumer.usa.canon.com

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