Poor quality prints on a Canon BJC-8200

I have tried printing some pictures taken on a Canon Powershot A70 on
a BJC-8200 printer. The picutres were taken at maximum resolution and
minimum compression, i.e. the best quality image the camera can
produce. When printing a 4"x6" image on Kodak Premium photo paper (
glossy ), the print quality is quite poor. Shaded regions have a
visible pixelated look. I am printing using Windows 2000 Pro and have
the latest Windows 2000 driver from Canon's web site. Also I've tried
using all the media type settings the driver has, including 'glossy
photo film'. I've also tried forcing the drive to use only diffusion
for halftoning. That improved things slightly, but the pixellation is
still visible. I expected the prints to have a quality close to a lab
print from film. Anyone know what the problem may be, or are my
expectations too high.

Thanks,
Stephen

 

My BJC-8200 gave outstanding prints until the print head went south*. The
cost of replacement was too high so I changed it to an i950 which is even
better. Maybe you have some cloged nozzles or the head needs a new
alignment. Alignment is easy to do but to unclog the head, I suggest
dunking it in demineralized (sp??) water overnight and doing a couple of
cleaning cycles.

Jean

* I tried cleaning the head in something stronger than water, a big booboo.

 

Have you tried printing much larger eg A4?

Took me a while to realise that the opposite of normal photographic rules
applies ie:-
as the printer has a fixed resolution, no matter what image size it is
printing, larger prints have correspondingly better resolution and more
detail.

Just a thought,
Laurence