Rating: 
Summary: Great photos with limited paper selection.
Review: There is a lot to recommend about this printer. The prints are excellent. It is easy to use. My biggest complaint is that it only works well with Canon paper, which is limited in variety and somewhat hard to find. I recently had to visit five stores to get 4x6 and 8x10 size paper plus replacement tanks of photo cyan and photo magenta, which the printer uses more of than the primary colors. It also works with Ritz brand glossy bubble jet paper but the prints are a little green (which occasionally produced a better print). I also noticed occasional paper feed problems with thicker papers. In one instance, borderless 4x6 prints on Ritz paper began to misfeed near the end of the page and ruin the print. Six individual ink tanks is a real plus if you don't encounter supply problems. Highly recommended if you have a well stocked store nearby.
Rating:
Summary: 2nd opinion: Almost there!
Review: After I first bought this printer I thought it was incredible, maybe perfect. But after I've had it for a while I'm more sensitive to its flaws vs. a photo lab, and so am updating my review. First of all, this printer produces incredible output... for an inkjet. I thought I had found something that would make the local photo lab obsolete. At the time I did not know I could just take my digtal pictures to the local photo lab for 1hr processing, just like traditional film. Now that I've discovered this and have been able to compare like pictures on both the printer and from the lab, I can say that the output of this printer is easily inferior to that of a lab.In some pictures you really can't tell the difference, but I often see a perceptible halftome screen (think hunderds of barly visible dark lines all the way across the print). Certain shades are still a bit grainy, color gamut is a bit weak, and there is way too much detail in shadows. Even when set to the dark setting in the driver, the printouts are too bright. In pictures that have dark areas, there is a somewhat sudden drop off from high shadow detail to sudden pure black(which in the case of the 820 is just not dark enough). Also I now realize that this printer has a nasty habit of really bringing out the noise in pictures that have a moderate amount(it's worst with Photo Paper Pro). Prints from the lab manage to hide this noise altogether. I must re-emphasize that this printer does an incredible job, but I think if you get this printer and print some photos and then see the same photos side-by-side from a photo lab, you will find it lacking. On the other hand, I'm sure a lot of people will find these print-outs more than adequate.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Quality and Easy to use
Review: This is a good printer. It prints fast, has great quality, the ink cartridges are cheaper than others, and you can easily remove the printer head for cleaning (if needed). I bought the Canon s820 to replace an Epson C80 that refused to print after replacing an ink cartridge. When I saw that the Canon s820's printer head can be removed by pulling 1 lever (unlike my Epson C80 which required shipping back to the factory) I bought it and have been happily printing pictures from my digital camera for a couple of months now with ZERO issues.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Investment!
Review: I would strongly recommend that you do not purchase this printer. While the quality of print is good, it goes through black ink cartridges ($12 a pop) at about 1 every 2 weeks. Besides the cost--this is really a pain in the behind since it doesn't give you any warning; it just stops printing and tells you in replace the cartridge before it will print again.
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable prints made easy!
Review: You can add my voice to the chorus of happy owners. Before I purchased this printer ... I read all the reviews, here and on other web sites. The comments were universally favorable. I admit I was a little suspicious that no one was unhappy with this printer. But now that I own one I know why. This printer is excellent!
The quality of the color prints is outstanding. I've followed others' recommendations and so far I've only used Canon paper. But the Canon high-resolution paper is enough for beautiful prints. However, for even showier glossy prints the Canon Paper Pro paper is unbelievable. Truly amazing quality! Installation was a non-event. My Windows ME had no trouble installing the S820 printer by following the instructions that came with the printer. The printer does require a sturdy support. I had intended to place it on a wire shelf where my old Canon BJC 610 had sat. But the print head moves so forcefully that I feared the printer would walk itself off the shelf and come crashing down onto my monitor. However, sitting on a two-drawer file cabinet it does fine, merely rocks the cabinet back and forth a bit. In addition to the usual color work, I do a lot of restoration and printing of black and white photographs. I was concerned that the printer might not produce satisfactory prints using only one color, black, since it does use six colored inks. Not to worry. To my delight, the gray-toned prints came out perfectly. The printer is not especially noisy. It won't disturb a quiet work environment. So far my only quibble is with the software package that came with the printer. PhotoRecord does let you print different images on the same page to save paper. But it won't print Photoshop PSD images even though Photoshop Elements came with the Canon scanner I recently purchased. PSD is now a common file type and should be printed by the bundled software. Of course, the printer will print any known format, including PSD, but just not through the paper-saving PhotoRecord program. Also, PhotoRecord will let you manually place and size multiple images on a page, but it fails to tell you the size of your image. So trying to print exactly a 4X6 image is guesswork. Auto mode will print 4X6s but then you lose placement control. To sum up, the Canon S820 printer is much better than I had expected for the price. I am delighted, nay thrilled, with the print quality. My only concern is that with the prints looking so good, I may print pictures I would otherwise have just saved to disk. So my print storage drawers my get as crowded as before. Oh well. Such is the price of owning a printer that makes breathtaking prints.
Rating:
Summary: Painless Performance
Review: Out of the box and printing in 35 minutes due to excellent setup instructions and software. Best user manual I have seen. Great print quality. A remarkable value for the money. Thanks [...] Canon!
Rating:
Summary: Using Kodak Paper on Canon Printer
Review: I purchased this printer to replace an HP895 that I used for printing photos, after reading the reviews and trying it myself, I agree that the best results are from Canon Paper, but since I had about 50 sheets of Kodak paper laying around I thought I would see how good it could print with Kodak paper. ...
Rating:
Summary: Amazing speed and super quiet!
Review: I can't tell you enough about this printer. It is truly amazing. High quality photos print so fast and it is so quiet. Thanks Canon!
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Summary: BEWARE OF CANON S800 Series PRINTERS - NO INK AVAILABLE
Review: Do not buy Canon S800 series printers until they are forced to allow others to produce their proprietary ink cartridges. We have had our S800 printer for a year now and we have had nearly three m0nths of down time because Canon has been out of stock on the black ink four time. Their claim of a 25 year life for photos is great but beware of that too. We find that our S800 only prints on Canon paper - which is extremely expensive. I do not know if they have changed this with the S820 but it is a big problem with the S800. Very poor customer service and support from Canon makes a canon photo printer purchase a very bad idea. The color is not true to life and the text is blurry
Rating:
Summary: Very Versatile, Very Capable
Review: This is a very capable all-around printer. I have a fairly fast laser printer, but it is an older model without a power-saver mode and it uses too much electricity to keep on all day. I bought the S820 for use as an everyday low-volume and color printer. I made my choice based on prior experience with Canon products and the specifications of the S820 in particular. I wasn't disappointed. Setup was painless both from a hardware and a software standpoint. The printer does need a fairly sturdy base. It isn't heavy, but the head moves so fast that it generates a lot of lateral momentum. It's pretty quiet, just the typical inkjet "clacks" and "whirrs." It also seems mechanically very efficient. So far, this is the best all-around printer I've ever owned. It does everything extremely well for the price -- photos, graphics, B&W text, and color text. I'm a software developer and it is great for source code print-outs in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, since that application can now color-code source print-outs and the printer has a mode which can pack two or four pages in one! It seems to be extremely versatile in terms of usable media, and I have yet to have a single jam or misfeed. Like all inkjet printers, the ink bleeds, so print quality is a function of media and printer settings. It pays to experiment with paper and settings (easy to do with the canon print driver). The S820 is not quite as crisp as a laser printer for pure black text, but more than adequate for everyday letter writing, etc. -- especially given that you can spice up a document with color! In brief, the right purchase for me. If I need to print 50 pages at a time, I'll still fire up the laser printer, but the S820 will do the bulk of my printing from this point forward.
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