i900D Color Bubble Jet
Photo Printer

The Effects page lets turns your photo into a simulated color illustration, slide the lever to increase or decrease the effect. You can also create a monochrome effect like Sepia, Pink, Blue, Green or select a custom color. The Vivid Photo option enhances the green and blue colors and contrast and may be too much for some images. You can also enable or disable the Image Optimizer or Photo Optimizer PRO enhancements which help produce better enlargements from lower resolution images.

The Photo Noise Reduction option helps reduce the "speckle" noise often found in blue areas such as the sky. It has two settings: Normal and Strong.

Left is no Photo Noise Reduction, Right is with PNR enabled.
(Click on either thumbnail to see a larger sample image)

The Profiles page lets you load, create or save custom sets of printer parameters for the type of printing jobs that you do frequently.

The Maintenance page lets you clean the print heads with options for a regular cleaning cycle or a "deep" cleaning cycle for really clogged heads. There is also an option for aligning the heads or checking the print nozzles. You can also set the Auto Power Off time, Custom Settings and the Quiet Mode. From here you can also start the Status Monitor (see next frame.)

The Status Monitor shows you visibly the level of ink in each of the ink tanks. It also tells you the status of the printer and the setting of the paper thickness lever.

When one of the tanks is low the Status Monitor will pop-up to alert you. The low tank(s) will have a yellow exclamation mark over it to let you know that it needs to be replaced soon. The ink warning first comes on when there is still some ink remaining so you won't run out in the middle of a printout and waste a sheet of costly photo paper.

Here's the low Photo Magenta ink tank after I finished the current print job. The chamber on the left side is full of ink when the tank is new. As you can see it drained the left chamber completely and the foam-filled side that feeds the head is very close to empty. The Photo Magenta and Photo Cyan tanks consistently run out faster than the other colors when printing photos so there's little argument for the need of these additional colors.

The Print Preview function is the last place you can abort the print so it's nice that Canon has now added the display of the paper size, paper type and the printing type. These items were not incorporated in earlier print drivers and are a welcome addition to the i900d's driver.

Steve's Conclusion

The Canon i900D is a very versatile printer allowing you to make photo-quality borderless prints with or without the need of a computer. When connected to the computer it functions as a photo and all-purpose color printer and a multi-format card reader/writer device. At home or away from home the i900D lets you print photos directly from your flash memory card (or Microdrive) or by plugging any PictBridge-compatible digital camera into the front-mounted USB port.

I very much like the new 4x6" paper tray, it's really nice not to have to unload one paper, adjust the guide and then load a different size paper. Most of us print 4x6" photos with the occasional 8.5x11" photo print but mostly I think we print 4x6" photos and use standard letter size paper for our day to day normal printing tasks. Now all you need do is turn a dial on the 4x6" paper tray when you want that media and turn the dial the other way when you want the letter size paper.

The i900D's print quality is equal that of Canon's i960 but it isn't as fast because its print head only has 1,536 nozzles versus 3,072 nozzles on the i960. If speed is your thing and you don't need the standalone features of the i900D then go with the i960 instead.

My real world tests with the i900d hooked up to my Windows XP machine via a 7-port USB 2.0 hub is as follows:

Borderless 4x6", Standard Quality, Photo Paper Pro ..... 1 min. 15 secs.
Borderless 4x6", High Quality, Photo Paper Pro ......... 1 min. 40 secs.

Borderless 8.5x11", Standard Quality, Photo Paper Pro .... 3 minutes
Borderless 8.5x11", High Quality, Photo Paper Pro ........ 4 minutes

The same print speed tests but this time we are printing EOS Digital Rebel 6-megapixel images directly from a CF card in standalone mode:

Borderless 4x6", Standard Quality, Photo Paper Pro ..... 1 min. 45 secs.
Borderless 4x6", High Quality, Photo Paper Pro ......... 2 min. 30 secs.

Borderless 8.5x11", Standard Quality, Photo Paper Pro ...4 min. 10 secs.
Borderless 8.5x11", High Quality, Photo Paper Pro ...... 5 min. 15 secs.

(Timing was from paper feed to paper drop in the output tray)

The latest Canon printers come with a nice bundle of software applications. Canon's Easy PhotoPrint makes printing simple, any size paper with many different multiple prints per page layouts and cropping options. You are shown a visual preview of the final print output before the actual printing begins. You also get Canon's ZoomBrowser which is like a Windows Explorer for graphic files. Folders of images are shown in thumbnail form where you can view, edit and print them quickly. One of the new inclusions in the software bundle is Canon's Easy-WebPrint which runs as an add-in with Internet Explorer. This makes printing web pages a snap. You can select to print background colors and images or not to print them. Many people ask me how to print my reviews because we use white text on a black background. By default Easy-WebPrint does not print the background and it changes the white text to black -- voilla! Problem solved.