After its impressive opening salvo in the shape of the Pixma iX7000, Canon’s next round could leave you feeling a little underwhelmed. Don’t be. Its workmanlike appearance belies its powerhouse capabilities as a dedicated A3 photo printer – something that reveals itself when you flip open its lid and realise you have to slot eight individual dye-based ink cartridges costing around £10.99 each into its printhead.

Once you’ve regained your composure over that (and the £529 cost), it’s time to take a serious look at its virtues. Having individual ink tanks should not only save money in the long run by allowing you to use less of each one with each print, but with black, yellow, cyan, magenta, photo cyan, photo magenta, red and green colours on board, the results promise to be pretty good – more on that in a moment.

As you’d expect from a dedicated photo printer rather than an office workhorse, the Pro9000 Mark II has a remarkably different approach to paper handling. Instead of a front-loading cassette tray and duplex unit, you get a rear paper tray that’s capable of holding up to 150 sheets of plain A3 paper at a time, plus a one-sheet manual feeder at the front.

Getting the printer up and running in short order is easy too, although this time, you have the option to use Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0, which is included as part of the bundle. The Pro9000 Mark II can also accept a wide range of photo and fine art papers, along with other third-party materials (including canvas) and it has a flat paper path.

Printing out our test image using both the standard and highest quality settings netted us output times of around 2 minutes and 4 minutes respectively – again a remarkable performance given that its A3-size we’re talking here. But it’s the image quality that really impresses. It’s immediately obvious that the Pro9000 Mark II is capable of far better results than the iX7000 and delivers great colour accuracy, contrast and shadow detail, cleanly picking out areas of the picture that are lost on the iX7000. Page yield costs come in at £1.87 per print using Canon’s Platinum Pro photo paper.