First prints.

OK, so this page is one day late. I had intended to publish this on Friday 1st October, but I needed to see and confirm the print quality under good daylight conditions. The first print was to say the best, very poor. This was a print made with all the settings on Auto. The next print with ICM selected was marginally better. On both prints Sophie looked like she had fallen asleep under a sun bed, her skin colour is an unacceptable magenta. It took me a further 9 A4 sheets to get the perfect print. I know we shouldn't expect everything to be to our own taste straight from the box, but having reviewed previous Canon models and seen how accurate the colours can be, I feel the PIXMA ip8500 could have produced a better colour. The best prints (so far) were made using Manual colour Adjustments, select Enable ICM and then altered the slider settings to -15 Magenta, +3 Black and +4 Intensity. These settings produced an excellent print, which I am more than satisfied with. I have saved these settings and will use them for the rest of the review. My daughter Sophie must be one of the most viewed babies on the web, she is four years old now (recent picture of her is on page 6). If you want to print the test image, then click on the first "Original print" to download the Test.jpg image ( a 751K file that will expand to 20mb). Save it to your hard disk - please note that this image is for your own personal use.

Original print	First print set on Auto	9th print with custom settings

The first prints were made on Photo Paper Pro 101, this was the media that was supplied to me for the review. It is not the latest pack, it still carries the "For BJC-8200 Photo" label on the front. However, the sheets are watermarked on the back, so it is recent stock. There is a new version of PPP and this is supplied in a redesigned pack.

Printing times were very fast, for the print in Auto mode, with Print Quality set to Standard, the A4 test print took 46 seconds. The same print with the Print Quality set to High took 1min 36sec. Both timings were made from paper drop to final delivery and do not include any spooling times (which were minimal on my system, but may vary from computer to computer).

The eyeball close ups are my next test. This is to see the size of the print dot and if there is any gaps in the printing. As previously stated, the high resolution of today's printers makes this test superfluous, as you can't see the dot without the aid of a magnifying glass. The ip8500 uses 6144 nozzles to deliver 147 million 2 picolitre drops per second - WOW! This ensures " grain-free prints of unsurpassed clarity" - I thought grain was normally associated with film. Strange how digital equipment manufacturers still look over their shoulders for film comparisons.

scanned at 600dpi	scanned at 1200dpi
Canon i950 at 600dpi	Canon i9950 at 600dpi
Epson R800 at 600dpi	HP 7960 at 600dpi

Looking at Sophie's eyeball under very high magnification you will be hard pushed to see the print dot. At 1200dpi a slight cross hatch is just visible, this is nothing to worry about, unless you want to produce 6ft x 8ft prints on a regular basis and need to view them from six inches. Although the first prints have a magenta cast in the skin tones, the corrected print (above) shows a very neutral colour on the pupil - remember the i950 produced a blue eye. Looking at the collection of eyeballs, the ip8500 puts in the best result. (The i950 was scanned in at a slightly lower size, this was done with an old Microtech scanner, I now use an Epson 4870 for all the review print scans).

PIXMA ip8500
Canon i9950
Epson R800
Good Blacks	Reds are weak due to the removal of magenta
Strong yellow and good green	Blues are cool, again due to the removal of magenta
i990 blues	i9950 blues

The cotton reel test shows that the ip8500 is capable of delivering highly detailed photographs. Due to the fact that I had to remove 15 magenta the blues are not quite accurate, see the i990 & i9950 shots.

I will experiment further with the colours during this review. Tomorrow I will take a look at how this printer deals with monochrome.