Canon Pixma iP8500

Reviewed on 5/9/05    Release date: 10/15/04    Easy duplex printing, excellent performance, an extended color gamut, flexible paper handling, and an affordable price make the Canon Pixma iP8500 a versatile performer for a broad range of graphics-printing tasks. With its eight-color ink set--it uses the same consumables as the medium-format i9900--the iP8500 brings the flexibility and the quality of its bigger sibling to those who want the same excellent print quality but don't need the ability to handle larger paper.

Design of Canon Pixma iP8500

The Canon Pixma iP8500 couldn't be easier to set up. Freed from its foam packing, it can be plugged into a power source, linked via a USB cable to your computer, and outfitted with its printhead and eight ink cartridges in less than 10 minutes. Add another few minutes to install Mac or Windows printer drivers, and you're in business.

The solidly built iP8500 folds up to a boxlike 17.8 by 11.5 by 6.7 inches when not in use; it unfolds to reveal a vertical 150-sheet input tray, which doesn't rob you of desk space behind the printer, and a sliding output tray in front, which calls for an extra 6 inches of clearance. A 150-sheet cassette fits flush with the front of the printer when loaded with 4x6-inch paper but projects outward when filled with larger-size paper. At 15.4 pounds, this printer is light enough to be relocated from one place to another in an office or a home without calling in a moving company.

You won't find many controls to fuss with. A large power switch is embedded in the upper-right corner of the printer, just above a PictBridge port, a paper-feed button, and a paper-source switch with LEDs that show which input tray is selected. You can override the paper-source setting in the driver and use the other tray any time you like, so it's easy to keep two different-size paper stocks loaded and to alternate between them. The printer automatically switches from one tray to the other, so you can load up with 300 sheets of the same stock for long print jobs.

Features of Canon Pixma iP8500

The Canon Pixma iP8500 uses the same print engine and ChromaPlus eight-tank ink system as the year-old, medium-format i9900. If you're looking for state of the art from Canon, check out the six-color iP5000, with its 1-picoliter droplets, as opposed to the 2-picoliter droplets on the iP8500 and the i9900. But the iP8500's extended color gamut in the reds, oranges, and greens--the result of adding red and green inks to the traditional CMYK, photo cyan, and photo magenta--is as appealing today as it was when the i9900 was first introduced. You can output all these colors to a wide range of Canon paper stocks. These include transparencies; semigloss, matte, and several varieties of glossy paper; and a semigloss double-sided paper that lets you print directly to the pages you'll include in your album or presentation.

Given the dearth of controls on the printer itself, you'll rely on the well-organized, six-tab printer driver to access the basic and advanced features. Clustered on the main tab are adjustments for paper type, input tray, quality, and color adjustment (either automatic or manual, with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black sliders), along with a check box to specify grayscale printing. If you're not sure what settings you want, Canon's wizardlike Print Advisor can lead you through all the steps.

Other tabs let you choose duplex printing; specify the edge to use for stapling (and the margins to leave for the staples); apply watermarks or background images; boost saturation of greens and blues to accentuate foliage and sky without affecting skin tones; or add color toning such as sepia or pink hues. Two Image Optimizer selections improve the quality of low-resolution images by softening jagged, pixelated edges. If your digital-camera image is fraught with noise, the printer can reduce the multicolored speckles, too. All your settings can be saved as a profile, so you can print the same type of job later without having to re-enter your preferences.

You can perform all the usual nozzle-cleaning and printhead alignment chores within the driver, along with a bottom-plate cleaning step (using a piece of letter-size paper that's been folded and straightened out) that's recommended before starting any duplex printing.

Performance of Canon Pixma iP8500

Speed and operation
Given that the Canon Pixma iP8500 uses the same technology and inks as the i9900, we expect the ink and paper costs per page to be identical. That works out to about $1.01 for an 8x10 print on a sheet of letter-size Photo Paper Pro (14 cents ink cost, 87 cents per page for the paper). Because each color can be replenished separately, you need to replace only the hues that a built-in optical ink-monitoring system determines are empty.

Canon describes the printhead as the world's longest, with the highest nozzle density: 768 nozzles per color, for a total of 6,144. All those tiny nozzles allow it to spit out droplets of ink at 4,800x1,200dpi in each pass, accounting for the 3.5 pages per minute text speed and 0.6 photo pages per minute in CNET Labs' tests.


Image quality
Overall, the Canon Pixma iP8500's output looks excellent, with a broad dynamic range and sharp detail rendering in bitmaps. It renders excellent curves and sharp text on coated paper, making this a good candidate for proofing page layouts.

We picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Canon and tested its output with photos of ripe red tomatoes, a carved pumpkin, and lots of scenes with foliage. The iP8500 really does produce a surprisingly full range of tones in the reds and oranges, as well as lots of detail in both shadows and highlights in landscapes dominated by grass, trees, and other greenery. If anything, saturation for these tends to be a bit too brilliant; if you don't want the colors to assault your viewer, you might want to tone things down a bit with your image editor. Skin tones are warm but acceptable and relatively accurate. Oddly, the cyan primary looks more like turquoise, and colors tend to shift slightly under different light sources.

Service and support of Canon Pixma iP8500

Canon backs the Pixma iP8500 with a one-year limited warranty and a satisfying array of support options. For example, toll-free live technical support is available Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET, and Saturday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. There's also a toll-free TDD support line for the hearing impaired, plus a separate number to call to locate authorized service centers for carry-in repairs.

In most cases, you'll find everything you need on Canon's Web site: FAQs, an interactive step-by-step troubleshooting wizard, and e-mail to live tech-support representatives. You'll also find warranty terms, the latest drivers, and downloadable versions of the manuals and drivers you received in the box.