Rating: 
Summary: Amazing Printer!
Review: I did a lot of research on printers and decided to wait for the Canon S900 to come out. It was definitely worth it...compared to other ink-jet printers, you are gaining in speed and quality, which is really what it all comes down to with a printer. The printer comes nicely packed with a quick-start guide and CD right inside the top of the box. The 6 ink cartridges are also tucked in, three on each side. I ordered backup ink cartridges as well. Ordering the ink cartridges without actually having seen the printer or what cartridges it takes was a bit of a risk, especially when the cartridges were shipped ahead of the printer and were labeled for the Canon S800. But they are fine. Look for the BCI-6xx model numbers and you will be fine. Also, be sure to order a USB A-B type cable as the printer does not come with one. These are very cheap, but if you get the printer and don't have a cable, it will make for a disappointing evening when you can't set it up. Setup was a breeze. The print quality is outstanding, and the printer is very quiet. I do a lot of graphics and text printing and it is amazingly fast and the the text is clear. I would recommend getting some good paper, though, as regular xerox machine type paper will not do this printer justice. I could notice a clear difference in text output. The six different ink cartridges could be viewed by some to be a downfall, but I would rather replace one $10 color when needed than have to replace all of the colors at once like in other brands. In summary, this is outstanding printer, and if you can afford it, you will not be disappointed. Coupled with a good digital camera, you will never need to get film developed again!
Rating: 
Summary: Don't Buy - Photos FADE quickly
Review: I bought this printer 15 months ago. Have always loved the printer and the quality of the output, but lately have noticed that ALL of the photos I have printed that are over 6 months old are FADED really BAD! We have sent hundreds of photos to relatives and when we visit their houses we see lots of our faded photos. These were all printed on Canon Photo Paper (PP Pro and PP Plus). We also have an HP Deskjet that is 3 years old. None of those photos (on HP Photo paper) have ever faded. Our old HP printer was "bordered". Time to buy a new borderless HP printer and go back to HP paper!
Rating:
Summary: Simplicity, Great Images at Fantastic Speeds
Review: Everything about the S900 is very easy. The setup, installing the ink tanks,and print head. The inital printhead alignment was almost automatic. I was printing pictures in about fifteen minutes. I was very surprised with the speed and quality of the finished product. I use, and recommend Canon's paper pro photo paper. I tried a few other brands and received the best results with the Canon product. I use an epson photo quality printer at work and the image quality is first rate. The Canon's image is as good, the the speed is unbeliveable. It is fast, very fast. The printing maintenance features on the Canon are also well though out. Monitoring and changing ink tanks is a breeze.The automatic printhead cleaning is also easy to preform. Best Photo quality printer I have ever used.
Rating:
Summary: Canon S-900 Pushes the Photo Printer Envelope
Review: The Canon S-900 is my first non-Epson photo printer. It is less than half the cost of the nearest Epson competitor, the 2000P. It can be purchased online for about 75% of its suggested list price of $..., and is worth every penny of it for picture perfect 2400 X 1200 dpi 6-color photo printing. It comes with a paper support, a manual and quickstart guide, six ink cartridges (black, cyan, photo cyan, yellow, magenta, and photo magenta), a power cord, and a CD with the driver and some other software, ZoomBrowser EX, Photo Record, and Photo Stitch, all of which work in Win 9x/Me/2K/XP, and MAC. Like other printer manufacturers, Canon saved some dough by not including an AB USB cable to connect it to your computer. Get one online or at Costco, otherwise you'll get stuck for over $...for a cable when you can get them for under $...elsewhere. Installation using the quick start guide is as easy as it gets. Install the printhead, load the six cartridges, plug in the power cord at both ends, plug in the USB cable at both ends with the printer off, and put the autostart installation CD in your CD-ROM. Everything is automatic, but beware, Canon says to plug the USB cable directly into your computer, not a hub. If you use a hub make sure it is powered, although you may still get an error when the driver tries to automatically detect the printer's port. When you get to the port detection dialog screen during installation, you are instructed to turn the printer on for automatic port detection. It may hang here if you're using a hub. The printer driver has quite a few little extras like custom print quality in addition to High, Standard, and Draft, halftoning, a print advisor wizard for newbies, an image optimizer for making smooth enlargements of low resolution photos, vivid photo for intensifying the sky, trees, and other background colors in landscapes while keeping skin colors correct, manual adjustment of balance, intensity and brightness (you really ought to do this in your photo editor software), normal/fit-to-page/scaled printing, booklet/banner/borderless/duplex printing,and the usual suspects such as choosing specialty media. This printer is best with Canon's Photo Paper Pro (wouldn't you know it), and gives incredible colors with default driver settings on this paper. The Photo Paper Pro glossy prints are virtually indistinguishable from 35 mm photo prints. There are downloadable ICM files to use with specific specialty papers, mostly Canon papers. You can set it up in Paint Shop Pro 7.04's color management system to get colors that print like they look on screen, and I assume you could do this with Photoshop also. This printer is not designed to be an all around office printer, and doesn't do text very well. I use mine at home solely for printing photos, and haven't had a single paper jam in two weeks (keep in mind I'm using 10 mil photo paper only). I have an HP LJ6 laser printer for text, and an HP 895 color inkjet for all around stuff. I would not recommend networking it, and don't think you easily could. The difference between this model and the S-9000 is that the latter will print 13 X 19 paper and costs $...more. Consumables like specialty paper and inks (OEM & compatibles) are available online for good prices. I highly recommend this printer as the nearest you're going to get to 35 mm prints without spending your kid's college education fund. ...
Rating: 
Summary: Very pleased so far
Review: I have only had this printer since December and have only used it to print photos. In the course of using it, I have been extremely pleased. The color quality is very good, the print quality is good. I use matte paper and the pictures look exactly like the display from my camera (Nikon CoolPix 995 = excellent) -- no pixelation, no color washout if the picture is enlarged, true color replication from the camera's image (as loaded onto my computer). Set up is relatively easy. And the six separate ink tanks (black, yellow, cyan, magenta, photo-cyan, photo-magenta) is a nice innovation because it allows me to replace only the ones that go empty (my old Epson required a complete replacement of the yellow-red-blue tank if one color ran out). I've printed more than 100 photos at the highest quality setting and the photo color tanks are still 2/3 full. The main drawback is that you cannot connect a camera directly to the printer, and that is probably why Canon replaced this model with the S830D, but this model got better reviews from electronics testers. Canon is the best of the photo printer makers, so if you do not need to direct-print from the camera, finding this model will be worth the search.
Rating:
Summary: Great printer but dont believe Canon Hype
Review: This printer produces fantastic results . However unless you are operating Windows XP with Pentium 4 don't believe the hype that you will get a page a minute. I print from an apple dual 800 with massive memory and have tried a variety of software packages to print but it cant do an A4 in under 2 minutes. When I rang Canon New Zealand they were pretty unhelpful and said it was my look out that I didnt check with them before buying the printer because speed varies with operating systems etc etc etc.
Also beware ther figures they quote for ink duration. If you are printing on Photo Paper Pro expect the followin results per cartridge which I got averaging over 750 A4 pages .
Black 156 pages, Magenta 97 pages, Cyan 156 pages, Photomagenta 55 pages, Photo Cyan 65 pages and Yellow 97 pages.
...
Rating: 
Summary: I loved it while it worked
Review: Keep in mind this is a consumer printer. It is not going to hold up long if you print hundreds of pages per month. I had mine for almost two years before it started acting up. I've probably printed between 300-500 full page (letter size or 8x10) prints with some smaller prints mixed in. It has now started clogging (one or more colors stop coming out) and doesn't appear to be as sharp as it used to be. Using the cleaning or deep cleaning feature helped at first but it clogged again last night very soon after cleaning it. Using the cleaning feature seems to waste a lot of ink and this will fill up or saturate the waste ink pads inside the printer. Once the waste ink pads are full, the printer will not print any more and you have to have the printer serviced if you ever want to use it again. Mine hasn't stopped working yet but I'm sure the waste ink is getting full and I'm tired of wasting ink anyway by trying to "clean" it. From reading up on this printer on the Web, it appears the print head is the weak link. Some people have had it replaced several times. A new print head is around $85 and the waste ink pads are about $25 just for the parts. I was quoted $135 to replace the head and pads. Since I did like the printer when it was working and because I already have extra ink for it, I was going to get it fixed. I then found a refurbished S900 here on Amazon for $99. It supposedly comes in the box from Canon and has a 90 day warranty and comes with ink! If it comes with all six colors of Cannon ink, that is worth $72 alone! I just bought the refurbished printer and wrote this review to help those of you who are having similar issues. I hope the refurbished printer works. If not, I'm going to find the nearest Canon office and throw both printers through the front window. One more thing, don't waste your time, money or ink by using non-Canon paper. Kodak paper in particular (even their best paper) does NOT work well in this printer. I understand there are some 3rd party papers that work well in this printer but I have yet to use one. I have tried Kodak, HP, Epson, and a few other brands and they all stink. I prefer the Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy. It seems to look as good as the Photo Paper Pro and costs a little less. Namaste and Good luck!
Rating: 
Summary: Bad print heads
Review: I had the S900 for over a year and everything worked perfectly. Then the print head broke, horrible banding that simply couldn't be fixed. So I inquired and ordered a new one - $85 thank you very much. I got it home and within 5 minutes it too had broken. I took the (new) broken printhead back to the store and they replaced it free. That was in December 2003. Now, March 2004, the print head has broken down - AGAIN. I love the quality of the prints, absolutely terrific. But the continuing technical problems make this printer a lemon. I paid $350 in early 2002 when this printer came out and I feel I overpaid given the recurring problems. Canon should be punished for releasing a sub-standard printer like this on to the market.
Rating:
Summary: Just after warranty expired it broke
Review: I have loved the quality of the prints for a little over a year. Then the printhead broke. I called for a replacement part and the replacement costs $97 before shipping costs. Great printer - just wish it worked. I will not buy Cannon again.
Rating:
Summary: The best Inkjet ever
Review: This is the best inkjet for photo printing.
Pros: Very fast. Excellent quality.
Cons: None that I can find.
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