Canon S820

The Canon S820 is a high-quality photo printer that outputs at resolutions up to 2,400 x 1,200 dots per inch (dpi).

Reasonably compact, yet not particularly stylish, the S820 includes both USB and parallel interfaces. This is now quite a novelty as USB is the current connection of choice. However, the parallel port is a bonus, particularly if your USB ports are being used for other peripherals.

The S820 comes with six ink cartridges as standard, which can help to keep the running costs down, as all six can be individually replaced.

The driver gives you the option of producing 4 x 6in prints, which are suitable if you own a digital camera and you want to print your own holiday snaps - especially as the S820 is capable of borderless printing.

So how did the S820 fare in our printer tests? Well, text on plain photocopy paper is far from good as you get a lot of feathering, which is something you wouldn't expect to see from a printer in this price bracket.

It's also very slow. Our 50-page pdf file took over 41 minutes to print and 50 pages of plain text took over 26 minutes.

On the other hand, the image output quality is good. It's not brilliant and we've seen far worse, but as this is a photo printer we'd expect better.

The biggest letdown is the high price tag. For £220 we'd expect a printer that is capable of printing reasonable text quality on plain paper. And, unfortunately, this printer sacrifices speed for high-quality prints.

We also think it's extremely stingy of Canon not to supply a USB cable with the printer.

SPECIFICATIONS

• 2,400 x 1,200 max resolution
• Six-cartridge format
• Windows 95 to XP and Mac OS 8.6 onwards
• 430 x 294 x 177mm (w x d x h)
• USB and parallel connection
• One-year on-site warranty

DETAILS
Price: £219 (£180.68 ex VAT)
Contact: Canon 0800 616 417
www.canon.co.uk