Rangefinder Magazine
December 2001/Columns

Digital Photography by John Rettie
Little News from Japan and Canon S800 printer review

I have just returned from a trip to cover the Tokyo Motor Show. Two years ago I was in Japan at the same time of the year and a friend of mine purchased one of the first Nikon D1 cameras on sale. This year I was hoping to find the new Canon EOS-1D camera on sale, but to no avail. In fact, from a digital camera point of view, the trip was disappointing, as I did not see any cameras of interest to professional photographers that are not available in the U.S. Also prices are much the same as in the U.S. Gone are the days when a trip to Tokyo was a wonderful opportunity to purchase camera gear for bargain prices and find items unobtainable in the U.S.

However, Epson has a line of photo-quality printers on the market in Japan that are not on sale yet in the U.S. They feature seven individual cartridges, with an additional yellow color added to the mix. One of the printers, called the PM-950C, will also print directly onto CD-R discs.

Apparently black can be substituted for the extra color in the seventh cartridge for those who are more concerned about text printing than producing great photographs. Epson has been uncommitted about when or even if this new line of printers will make it to this side of the Pacific. Perhaps the U.S. division is waiting for the second generation of seven-color printers before introducing them here.

Who says a consumer point-and-shoot camera cannot produce a quality image? This shot of Honda’s concept Dualnote hybrid sports car was shot on a Nikon Coolpix 990, handheld at 1ž89 second.

At the auto show I noticed that only a handful of Japanese professional photographers covering the show seemed to be using digital cameras, yet the majority of Europeans and American photographers were. Several of my fellow professionals have only recently switched from film to digital. Primary choices are the Nikon D1, Canon D30 and Nikon Coolpix 990/995. In each case they are extremely happy with their decision to switch as they find themselves saving time and money. Time is saved as they are able to immediately confirm that they’ve got the picture they want rather than having to shoot lots of images and bracket.

Shooting cars on display at an auto show is very frustrating, as many of the cars are moving on turntables, and the lighting is harsh and/or mixed. In addition, there are dozens of people clamoring all over the exhibits wanting a closer look. Sometimes you’re lucky if you get one good shot, at other times you might have the luxury of five minutes for getting a great shot. Anyway, shooting cars at an auto show is an ideal situation for using a digital camera with its immediate feedback. In case you’re wondering I had hoped to try out the new Nikon Coolpix 5000 or Canon G2 camera at the show, but I could not get one for review in time. Instead I used my trusty one-year old Coolpix 990 to take images for a web site. Because I was also reporting on the show, I shot all the images without a tripod. Naturally, many of them were a little soft but certainly good enough for web use.

Canon S800 printer
It seems as if Epson garners most of the publicity for making inkjet printers best suited for photographers. It’s certainly true that Epson has made a niche for itself in this field. However, there are other inkjet printers on the market that are also aimed at users who want to produce photo-quality prints.

Canon for one has a printer that it specifically aims at photographers, called the Color Bubble Jet Photo Printer S800. Like the Epson range of Photo printers, the $299 S800 also uses six colors, the regular three; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black plus light Magenta and light Cyan. It has a 2400x1200dpi output and uses Canon’s MicroFine Droplet technology with 256 nozzles per color (1536 in total), to produces drops of 4 picoliters in size. The printer is capable of producing prints up to 8 inches wide and 65 inches long, though it is not fitted up for rolls of paper. It has a USB and parallel port and can be used with a PC or a Macintosh. One area where Canon is ahead of Epson is in the use of individual ink tanks rather than having five colors combined in one cartridge. Canon calls it the Think Tank System, which it rightly points out cuts down on ink waste when one or two colors run out before the others. It also claims that when the inks are used with Canon Photo Paper, Pro media prints will last for 25 years before fading. Of course, Canon does suggest keeping prints out of sunlight and mounting them under glass. So I guess reality is that they are probably little different from any photographic print.

The S800 printer includes two CD-ROMs with a variety of bundled software beyond the setup programs and drivers. These include ZoomBrowser and PhotoRecord for use on a PC; PhotoStitch for a PC and Mac along with ImageBrowser for use on a Mac only. In addition, Canon also includes a Microtech ZiO CompactFlash card reader, which is worth about $40. This USB card reader which will also read an IBM Microdrive can be plugged directly into a USB port on a PC or hooked up via a cable.

I have recently been using an S800 for regular printing as well as producing photo-quality prints. It was interesting to see how well it compares to Epson printers, which I have been using almost exclusively for several years. In one word, it’s comparable.

Once you get the printer out of the box, the immediately noticeable difference is that the inkjet heads are in a separate unit that has to be installed first. This is then followed by inserting the six separate cartridges. The printheads on an Epson are built in and so far Epson’s photo inkjet printers use one cartridge for five colors. However, as I discovered in Japan, this will change with the next generation of Epson Photo printers as it has already with the general-purpose Epson C80 printer which has separate ink cartridges for each color. It seems consumer demand to lower the wasteful practice of unused ink remaining in some color tanks has forced manufacturers to produce printers with separate cartridges. Hopefully, the next step will be bigger cartridges that last longer!

There is no apparent performance advantage to having removable printer heads in the Canon S800. The unit can be replaced, however, if the nozzles become blocked but as a replacement unit costs around $100 it’s almost more cost effective to buy a new printer. Incidentally, each ink cartridge costs around $12 so the cost of replacing all cartridges at once is much the same as replacing the two units on other inkjet printers. It’s after extensive usage when one color might run out much faster than the others might that the cost savings of separate cartridges becomes apparent.

In operation I found the S800 very similar to the equivalent Epson printers. It seemed as though the speed of output was nominally faster than the Epson Stylus Photo 790 or 1280. Print quality is pretty darn close. Without doing any tweaking or setup changes the output from the two printers are subjectively similar. One print produced on both printers had two people liking the Epson output better and one person preferring the Canon output. On close examination under a loupe the ink droplets seemed to be slightly more visible on the Canon prints. Yet when viewed at anything more than six inches both prints were perfectly acceptable as they are almost continuous tone in appearance. I am sure that if one tweaked the settings and experimented with different papers, one could get two prints from each printer to look identical. Reality is that the differences between different papers on one printer are greater than the differences between the two printers, if you follow.

The S800 cannot do edge-to-edge printing, unlike the latest Epson Photo printers, but that shortcoming will be remedied in the next version, called the S820D. According to Canon this new printer, which goes on sale next March, will offer the same quality as the S800 but will be able to read files directly from storage cards that will be inserted into a PC card slot using an adaptor. It will also be able to print directly from a Canon Powershot S30 or S40 cameras without needing a computer. In addition, there will be an optional ($99) small LCD screen for previewing images before printing. This printer will be comparable with the Epson 785EPX, which is already on the market.

I’ll admit I was pleasantly surprised by the output from the S800. Previously, when I have tried so-called photo inkjet printers from other manufacturers the quality has not compared well with Epson’s. Other printers might do black and white text better but none seemed to come close to Epson’s photo output until now with the Canon S800. I am not ready to switch to the Canon but at least it’s good to know there’s an alternative and if you like the idea of using individual ink cartridges in particular I’d recommend the Canon.

	Now you can enjoy a Mac running several programs at the same time with 1GB of memory for a cost of about $100. Three years ago it would have cost $800 to have a maximum of 512MB of memory.

Memory Upgrades
In case you haven’t noticed, the price of RAM memory has plummeted in the past year. I paid $150 for a 128MB DIMM module near the end of 2000. Recently I purchased a 512MB DIMM for $55 and the price may be even lower by the time you read this column. I already had the four slots on my Mac G4 filled with three 128MB DIMMs and one 256MB DIMM. By removing one 128MB DIMM and replacing it with the new 512MB DIMM I was able to up my computer’s RAM memory to 1GB. It’s really nice to be able to run Photoshop, with the memory set at 500MB, along with other programs loaded at the same time. Previously, I had three copies of Photoshop saved with one set at 120MB, another at 256MB and the third at 500MB. In this way I could load the smaller one if I wanted to have numerous other programs loaded at the same time or run the biggest version if I did not plan on having any other programs running beside the operating system. Now I can have Photoshop run with plenty of memory without worrying about running out of memory at inopportune moments.

PC users used to be able to buy RAM at cheaper prices than Mac users who had to put up with a proprietary configuration. Nowadays new Macs use the same SDRAM DIMM modules as most PCs. Even though a Mac will accept PC100 DIMMs I recommend getting the PC133 or PC150 DIMMs as they are likely to be more stable and faster. Some Mac users have reported problems with some DIMMs not being recognized by the computer. Mac specialist web sites such as macfixit.com and macintouch.com have covered the problems and one programmer has even posted a small utility called DIMMcheck, that will check the DIMM memory modules in your Mac to make sure they are within Apple’s specs.

If you haven’t already upgraded your computer to at least 512MB, or better yet 1GB, you should—there is no excuse now that prices are so low. Almost without exception your computer will run better with more RAM and it’ll make work more pleasurable as well. As prices are so low it also behooves you to use a brand name memory maker with a good warranty. In the past the price difference between no name and brand names has made the choice less obvious. Kingston is a good choice as they have a good reputation and their prices are now very reasonable, especially their ValueRAM line. Others with a good name are Crucial, Micron and Viking.

John Rettie is a photojournalist who resides in Santa Barbara, CA. He has been using a camera as a professional for 31 years, a computer for 21 years, and has combined his knowledge of both for the past eight years. Readers can contact him by e-mail at john@johnrettie.com or by snail-mail c/o Rangefinder.