Canon i860 InkJet Photo Printet Product Review

i860 Desktop Photo Printer, 4800 x 1200 dpi Pros Not bad for the price. Good mileage from the ink tanks. Cons Unreliable color saturation. The Bottom Line Wouldn't recommend this if you need accurate color photos.

Full Review

This printer seemed very good when I first got it. The setup was straight-forward and the included software was good for organizing and printing photos. As expected, no USB cable was included. It weighs about 13 pounds and it has a fairly large footprint - 12 1/4" x 16 1/2". Once it was installed, I printed a couple of 4-megapixel digital color photos that looked as good as or better than the same photos that I had developed at a Ofoto. For the test, I used Canon's 4x6 Photo Paper Pro ($9 for a pack of 20.) The prints took less than a minute at the highest resolution from the time the paper loaded to the time it finished. Paper handling is good. The standard paper tray holds a thick stack of 8.5" x 11" paper. There is also an attachment that holds a stack of 4" x 6" photo paper. The attachment and standard paper tray remain in the printer together. When you want to print in the 4" x 6" paper, you just turn a dial and the printer feeds photo paper. Turn the dial in the opposite direction and the standard paper tray is selected. I had a little trouble with the mechanism that engages and disengages the 4"x6" paper feeder. I would have to jiggle it when I turned the selection dial in order for it to work. The printer was very noisy when loading paper. It sounded like the whole thing was going to erupt. I thought I must have mis-assembled it. But once the paper was loaded, printing was quiet and fast. My next task was to print some photos I had taken at an outdoor summer party in Connecticut. The setting was surrounded by green trees, grass and shrubs. These were 4-megapixel digital color shots and I used the same Photo Paper Pro. This time, the results were disappointing. The greens were completely oversaturated and far too yellowish. I tried printing one of these photos on a Canon i960 and it looked much better, so I have to blame the i860. I cleaned the print heads and tried printing some of these shots again with no better results. A couple of weeks later, I needed to print some full-color real estate listing sheets. I used plain Canon Matte photo paper ($10 for a pack of 50) and printed lower resolution than I had with the photos. Again, the prints were very good. Exceptional, even. I printed more than 100 8x11 sheets and didn't run out of any of the 5 color cartridges. Quite impressive. These prints took only about 20 seconds as only about 30% of the page was taken up with color images and the rest was text. Next I printed some 4x6 black-and-whites that I had scanned from negatives. I tried a couple of different papers this time: HP and Kodak. Neither produced results nearly as good as those that I printed on Canon paper. There was a fair amount of banding using the Kodak paper and the HP paper seemed to have bumps on the printed surface. By this time two of the ink tanks were empty. I felt that I got a great deal of mileage out of the tanks and I was glad that I only had to replace two colors rather than a single tank that contained all colors. Changing the ink cartridges was a snap - literally. They pop in and out very easily. I spent $12 for each of the tanks. After a couple more weeks of printing various sizes photos and business material, I decided to return the printer. I was seeing the over-saturated greens too often and that was unacceptable. Two days ago I went out and got the i960. I'll write a review for it once I have a little more experience with it.

Go to Modal Music Theory for some cool stuff.