Canon Color Bubble Jet S800

WHAT'S HOT: Canon designed the S800 as a photo printer, giving the unit two extra inks (lighter shades of cyan and magenta) to capture subtle lighting and transitions. And the printer lives up to its billing, producing photos with subtle, rich colors and textures. Despite the use of six inks instead of four, the S800 has reasonable ink costs; relying on Canon's estimated yield for an ink tank, we figure a page of text should cost only 1.9 cents and a page of graphics only 12.8 cents.

WHAT'S NOT: The S800 printed our simple graphic test files even slower than the S600 did, at only 0.2 pages per minute, or 5 minutes per page--making the S800 the slowest graphics printer we've tested in ages. At a text speed of 2.5 ppm, the S800 isn't the pokiest text printer around, but it's definitely slower than average. And except for photographs, the S800's output quality appears markedly inferior to that of the less-expensive S600: Text is grayish and rough in places, narrow parallel lines overlap, and color images other than photos look slightly hazy and lose detail.

WHAT ELSE: Canon provides some graphics-oriented software with the S800, including PhotoStitch, for combining neighboring photos into panoramic shots, and PhotoRecord, for archiving photos. The S800 also comes with an online manual that is even longer and more thorough than the S600's manual.

BEST USE: Good photo quality and extra features make the S800 a suitable photo printer, but painfully slow printing speeds mean it won't double as a day-to-day printer.

SUMMARY

Canon Color Bubble Jet S800 Rated 1 minute for a 4-by-6-inch photo/2 minutes for an 8-by-10-inch photo, 2400-by-1200-dpi maximum resolution, 100 sheets input, 20 sheets output. $299 800/652-2666 consumer.usa.canon.com