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 speckle noise often found in blue areas such as the sky. It has two settings: Normal and Strong.

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. Because of the lower paper cassette, there is also has a Bottom Plate Cleaning option. There is 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 start the Status Monitor (see next frame.)

The Status Monitor shows you visibly the level of ink in each of the ink tanks. 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.

I always enable the Preview option (found on the Main driver page), this is displayed just before the printer begins to actually print. Here you can visually verify your image cropping, orientation, paper size, media type, paper source and the printing type (borderless / bordered) -- before accidentally wasting a sheet of expensive photo paper because a driver setting was incorrect.

Steve's Conclusion

The Canon PIXMA MP830 Office All-in-One can do everything the SOHO (small office, home office) user with a digicam needs. It's a 1200dpi flatbed scanner, a 35 page color copier with a builtin duplexer and a high quality 9600dpi photo printer. You can make digital prints directly from flash memory cards, PictBridge-enabled digital cameras or from a computer. Equipped with Canon's FINE printhead and 5-color individually replaceable ink tanks, it's an economical photo inkjet printer with exceptional print quality. It's also a very speedy G3 FAX machine and an all-purpose color printer with 300 sheets of paper at the ready. For US$299 it may be the only thing you need to run your small business and print your photos.

Printing from a flash memory card is quick and easy. Just insert the card, view and select the pictures on the large 2.5-inch color LCD, set your printing preferences and print - it's just that simple. You can also crop photos before printing, just press the Trimming button and follow the on-screen prompts. You can also print out an index sheet and fill in balloon circles by the photos you wish to print and then scan it and the printer does all the rest for you. It has options for brightening faces and removing red-eye in "people" photos. Printing directly from memory cards isn't much slower than printing from a computer. That says a lot for the MP830's internal processing power as older standalone devices often took 2-3 times longer to print than when connected to a computer.

When I reviewed the Canon iP4000 (which also uses the ContrastPLUS 5-color ink system) -- I wondered why most people would need a 6- or 8-color photo printer. These printers have a higher initial price and per-print cost due to the extra ink tanks. Unless you just have to have "the best of the best," I feel that you'll be more than pleased by the MP830's print quality. The vast majority of photo prints made are 4 x 6" size prints and you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between one made by the MP830 and one printed on the 8-color Canon i9900. Even the borderless 8.5 x 11" prints I made with Canon Photo Paper Pro looked simply amazing and as you can see from the chart below, this is no slow printer.

Print times using the same Nikon P3 8-megapixel JPEG image, Canon Photo Paper Pro glossy media and the different printing modes. Prints from computer were done using Canon's Easy- Photo Print, its "Quality priority" setting seems to be even higher quality than the "Fine" setting for flash cards as the print times are dramatically longer.

The MP830 uses exactly the same printing and scanning hardware as the PIXMA MP800R Photo All-In-One that we reviewed earlier. The differences between these two multi-purpose devices is that the MP800R is wireless and network-ready and has a builtin film and slide scanner but lacks the 35 page auto document feeder and FAX capability.