Canon Pixma Pro9000 MkII review

Canon's Pixma Pro9000 MkII A3+ inkjet aimed at professional photographers is a revamp of the original Pro9000, with improved mono print speed, support for a wider range of thirdparty photo papers, ambient light correction and even a copy of Photoshop Elements 6 thrown in.

It's hard to envisage many people paying about £500 for a wide-carriage photo printer and not possessing a copy of Photoshop, but there you are.

This is a full A3+ printer, so is quite a bit wider than equivalent A4 machines. It has a width of 660mm, so you'll need a wide desk or a separate stand to set it on. The machine's grey and black look is surprisingly plain and slightly dated. It has two big plastichrome buttons for power and paper feed, and a third, less showy button, to reverse the paper-feed direction.

The feed reversal is an interesting feature, as the printer can either feed from a fold-up, slightly ungainly, S-shaped paper support at the back to a telescopic output tray at the front, or from that same front tray to an extending paper support at the back, below the input tray and providing a fully flat paper path. A third feed option is for blank CD and DVD discs, which slide in from the front of the machine using the supplied holder.

Unfortunately, the Pixma Pro9000 doesn't have any memory card slots or an LCD display. While Canon may believe that professional photographers will at least want to run an image through Photoshop before committing it to print, there's often the need for a quick proof, and the facility to plug a memory card straight in and select from a thumbnail is a useful shortcut.

To get the Pixma up and running, simply plug the print head into its internal carrier and clip each of the eight ink tanks into the head. Canon adds green and red inks to the normal CMYK, Photo Cyan and Photo Magenta set, usually found in photo-centric inkjets, to improve landscapes and flesh tones, respectively. Given the quoted page yields for these extra colours, though, they're used very sparingly.

When it comes to speed this is an excruciatingly slow plain paper printer. A 10-page, black, text-only print took six minutes 28 seconds, while a text and colour graphics print - 10 copies of the same page, so only one rasterisation - took eight minutes. If you're a photographer using the machine for printing your invoices as well as your photos, we recommend you print the former overnight.

To make up for this, when you slide in a sheet of photo glossy paper, the Pixma switches into a different gear. A 15 x 10cm print came through in just 45 seconds, while a full-bleed A3 print took exactly two minutes. These are excellent times, particularly given the quality of the images produced.

The Pixma produced bright and deep photo prints, with natural hues and smooth gradations of colour. Shadow detail, often lost in our test images, is well reproduced here, and foreground detail is sharp and clean. Ambient light correction - a plug-in for Photoshop - takes into account the lighting conditions that your prints will be shown under, for exhibition work.

With eight inks to buy, print costs could be high, but we found the tanks available online for about £10, depending on the colour. When you factor in Canon's published ISO page yields, you get a cost of just over 20p for a 15 x 10cm photo which, while not quite as cheap as from some consumer-level photo inkjets, is not too bad. With a 15 x 10cm having a similar area to an A5 page, you can multiply up, giving £1.60 for an A3 print, which is pretty good.