Full review
When most people talk about printers, they talk about them in terms of printing documents and Web pages, but with more and more high-resolution cameras around, it's becoming more common for people to print large photos at home. If you want those big prints to look good, that means buying a medium-format printer, such as Canon's Pixma Pro9000.
Though it bears the Pixma Pro moniker, the £400 Pro9000 replaces the
Design
Compared with the i9900, the Pro9000 is slightly larger, checking in at 660 by 193 by 356mm with all its trays closed. That means you'll need to devote a decent amount of desk space to this printer. Also, if you plan to use the printer's front straight-loading path, you'll need to keep 40cm clear behind the printer, since you need room for the front-loaded paper to extend out the back. Though this can be awkward, some photo buffs prefer to keep some fine-art papers flat instead of feeding them through the normal L-shaped path, and the front-loading path is a welcome addition over the i9900, which didn't offer such a paper path.
Unlike some less costly inkjets, the Pro9000 doesn't include a built-in card reader. The assumption is that if you're printing at this size, then you'll most likely be printing from a computer. However, Canon does include a front USB port, in addition to the high-speed USB 2.0 port on the back of the printer. The front port lets you print directly from a PictBridge-compatible camera or camcorder.
Other
nice touches include wheels on the back of the printer, to make it
easier to position and reposition on your desk, as well as damped tray
mechanisms that keep the front and rear trays from slamming open.
There's no roll-feed option, so if you're looking to print panoramas,
you're stuck cutting down larger pieces of paper, because Canon doesn't
offer specific panorama-size papers.
Features
While Epson has always had a reputation for having more photo and art paper options than Canon, Canon has bolstered its offerings lately. Compared with the available papers for the similarly priced, but pigment-based, Epson R1800, the Pro9000 can accept a similar number of official Canon papers as that competitor can accept Epson papers. However, while both offer standard choices such as glossy, semigloss and matte, the selections beyond that are slightly different. For example, Epson offers two sizes of scrapbooking paper, one of which is sized to the scrapbooking standard of 300x300mm (12x12 inches).
Canon offers photo stickers and T-shirt transfers (for iron-ons). If you plan to use any out-of-the-ordinary papers, it might make sense to check out the offerings of Canon and its competitors at a local camera store, or on their Web sites -- Canon's is here. If you're looking to print onto CDs or DVDs, you'll have to skip the Pro9000, since it does not offer that feature.
As usual, Canon's print driver is very good. Controls are very straightforward and there's even a clearly marked None option in the colour management section, which comes in handy if you want a third-party program, such as Photoshop, to handle colour management. There are also a competent set of controls for black-and-white printing.
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