Digital Photography Now Printer Reviews | |||||
3-part series: Photo ink-jets laid bare | |||||
Updated 19th February - 2001 |
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Part 1: The truth about photo ink-jet running costs | |||||
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Canon S800
and you can seen inside how much is left
Each of the six different ink tanks, including black, cost £7.99, making a total of £47.94 for a full set.. The tanks are transparent, so we were able to observe which tanks would run out first. Meanwhile, Canon’s high gloss Photo Paper Pro paper costs £10.99 for 15 sheets; 73p per sheet. The S800 really races along, delivering the test page in just 137 seconds - nearly twice as fast as the Epson or HP. Canon doesn’t log the output of ink constantly and so you don’t get a gradually declining bar graph of ink levels like you do with other printers. Instead, Canon uses a small prism built into the transparent case of the cartridge. Once the ink has fallen below a certain level, light is no longer refracted away via the prism and the low ink warning is triggered. This means there is no guessing. Although the HP psc 950 ran out of yellow first, the first Canon S800 warning was for photo magenta at 48 pages. Then the photo cyan tank warning came on after 54 pages - at the same point the photo magenta tank ran out. The Yellow tank warning came on at 61 pages and succumbed no less than 9 pages later (70 pages ). At this stage we estimated the normal cyan and magenta tanks were still 80% full and the black tank 75% full. Our calculations added up to 45.2p per A4 test page, easily the cheapest of the three here. Unfortunately, the Photo Pro paper is easily the most expensive, bumping the total cost 4p above the Epson at 118.5p per page. However, this is not as high as the HP. Test results - printer by printer:|Feedback| |Features index| |Newsletter| |Home|
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