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Designed to be a complete home photo lab, the Pixma MP980 includes a 4,800dpi CCD scanner with a backlight and transparency frame so you can scan strips of 35mm negatives. This is combined with a six ink printer that takes pigment black for printing standard text documents as well as dye-based grey, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks. The addition of a grey cartridge makes this the first A4 printer we've seen that caters so specifically to black and white photo printing. The results are outstanding, with subtle

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grey tones and shading.

We had the opportunity to put its printer through some of our rigorous performance tests. Although this isn't the final version of the printer, the results were still encouraging. It produced its first page of sharp correspondence-quality mono text in just 15 seconds. The average colour print speed was 2.9ppm, but mono prints were slower than expected at 4.7ppm. It remains to be seen if this mono speed will improve in the release version.

Both document and photo quality improves on the already high standard we've seen from Canon's current range. Photos were sharp and beautifully coloured, and even the challenging brown and grey tones of our low-contrast test photo were reproduced with remarkable accuracy, probably because of the addition of the grey ink cartridge. The graphs and illustrations in our colour documents were bright and solidly coloured, while mono text, although somewhat slow to print, could not be faulted for its sharpness.

The printer is due out in October with an RRP of £249 inc VAT. We'll bring you a full review as soon as possible.