Canon cleverly placed all six colors in a single high-tech printhead. This means that the individual printheads (what you get on other printers) can't become unaligned and result in banding tracks which ruin your print. Banding is caused by more than one factor, but at least here is one potential cause removed.

Tests so far document the Canon W8200 has the highest quality of any thermal printhead machine in either of the FLAAR evaluation labs. The Canon is faster than any printer of its size or class. The ink costs less than Epson.

Our ratings of this printer's image quality is phenomenal. The specs alone don't tell the story. You have to see the resulting prints, and then compare this output with all the other brands such as Epson, Encad, and so on. We have over a dozen printers in the same room and the consensus was that the output from the Canon W8200 (and Canon W7250) was as good as the Epson and better than anything else in the entire university. This is how a printer gets our recommendations: actual output, compared and contrasted with its peers.

This is the first, and only 24" printer in the world with pigmented ink that can challenge the well entrenched Epson 7600. That's because neither Kodak, Encad, nor HP have any 24" printer with pigmented ink.