Canon Pixma Pro9000 review

Best of all, the driver provides an option for cleaning only a subset of the nozzles, instead of all the inks at once, though that's an option as well. This should help save ink since cleaning cycles are one way to eat up an ocean of ink. To avoid those cleanings, it pays to turn the printer off whenever you're not using it, since the heat from keeping the print heads active can lead to clogs.

Performance
Prints from the Canon Pixma Pro9000 look very pretty. Colours are vibrant and very accurate with a wide dynamic range and an impressive gamut. Of course that should come as no surprise, since the printer uses separate black, cyan, magenta, yellow, photo cyan, photo magenta, red and green ink cartridges. The green and red cartridges certainly do help in achieving solid performance in those colours, but the Pro9000 also excels in other areas of the spectrum. For example, we got some very nice deep and dark purples, which often won't even display properly on a monitor.

Possibly the most impressive thing about this printer is its speed. In Standard print quality mode, we were able to make a bordered letter-size print in 1 minute 7 seconds. Stepping up to High print quality, that time lengthened to 2 minutes 16 seconds. The Pro9000 turned out High quality borderless letter-size prints in 2 minutes, 39 seconds. Full 330x480mm (13x19-inch) borderless prints took 2 minutes 47 seconds in Standard quality mode and 5 minutes 13 seconds in High print quality mode.

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how long inkjet prints last. But the truth is that while dye-based prints, such as those from the Pixma Pro9000, typically get print permanence ratings around 50 years (Wilhelm Imaging Research hasn't finished its testing of the Pro9000 as of the writing of this review), and most pigment-based prints end up with ratings over 100 years, the C-prints that most people remember from the film days would fade well before either dye- or pigment-based inkjet prints.

Conclusion
If you don't mind the shorter display life of dye-based prints, or the paper restrictions of the Canon system, then the Canon Pixma Pro9000 is a great choice for a medium-format inkjet printer.

Additional editing by Nick Hide