The Canon S830D Photo Printer
Page 3.

First prints.

OK, before I go into more details about the printer I am going to produce a print from my test file, just to see what the S830D is capable of. The image on the right is a scan of the print-out. For my first test I used the printer in Auto mode, this assumes the user has a limited knowledge of printer settings. The media used is Canon's own Photo Paper Pro and Glossy Photo Paper.

Original	Canon Glossy Photo Paper	Canon Photo Paper Pro

The first print on Glossy Photo Paper (GPP) is remarkably good, producing colours that almost match the original. Whilst the print on Photo Paper Pro (PPP) is disappointing, it looks washed out, although nothing was changed other than the media settings. The GPP A4 print took 3min 45sec to complete whilst the PPP print took 2min 25sec, neither is as quick as the Canon S900 (90sec) but still excellent timings. The S830D dot structure is heavier compared to the S900/9000 printers. Vertical micro banding is also evident, but perhaps better hidden on the S830D than on the S900, due to its larger dot size. I should stress that this is not visible to the naked eye, my enlargements below are extreme. Regarding sharpness, in this first test the S900 seems to have the edge, which is quite surprising as the only difference is supposed to be in the amount of nozzles, ink droplet size and resolution are the same.

Eye detail at 600 on GPP	Eye detail on GPP
Eye detail at 600 on PPP	Eye detail on PPP
Eye on S900 PPP	Detail on S900 PPP

As stated the colours on the Glossy Photo Paper are more or less spot on, the cotton reels show detail in the black and yet maintain good highlight detail in the white reel. The reds are vibrant, again showing excellent detail in all the strands. I will return with more colour pictures at a later stage in this review and I will have a closer look at the resolution issue.

For those of you who still like to produce monochrome pictures, the Canon produced a neutral looking printout of the Venice scene. Again I will look at this in greater detail later on, together with the Greyscale printing option. (A slight moire effect was picked up by my scanner, this can be seen in the sky area, this is a clash between the print and the scan but can't be seen on the actual print)