Seeing this printer in the flesh for the first time is like being a tugboat captain who’s expecting to handle a cruiser, only to see an aircraft carrier turn up instead. This thing is huge. Measuring 647 x 530 x 260mm bow to stern and weighing in at 19.8kg, it’s a squeeze to get onto your desk and it almost takes two people to get it there in the first place. The Pixma iX700’s dark grey/silver finish and boxy looks round off the aircraft carrier analogy nicely.

Sticking out the front is a 250-sheet cassette that’s capable of taking paper up to A3 in size, plus a 10-sheet plain paper tray for manual feeds. At the back is a 20-sheet tray for photo paper, plus an auto-duplex unit for double-sided printing.

Inside you’ll find five slots for Canon’s Lucia pigment-based inks (pigment black, black, cyan, magenta and yellow), along with a sixth slot for a clear ink, which helps with fade resistance, colour bleed and smudging. Getting the printer up and running is very straightforward using a combination of Canon’s own software and Apple driver updates, but you may be alarmed by the Pixma iX7000’s regular bouts of vigorous shaking, caused by its need to agitate the ink inside the tanks when the printer’s sitting idle – you’re probably better off sticking it on its own table, if possible, although with a single USB connection, and no Ethernet or WiFi, your options are a little limited.

Another more serious sticking point is that the Canon Pixma iX7000 isn’t really aimed at photo enthusiasts as such; its primary target being Small Office Home Office users and Small and Medium Enterprises. While it’s capable of producing good-looking prints, it’s not as accomplished a performer as its bigger brother, the Pro9000 Mark II. Contrast and colour accuracy aren’t as good and there’s a noticeable loss of detail in dark areas of the picture. Having said that, the Pixma iX7000 churned out our test image in just 2 minutes 30 seconds in standard mode and 4 minutes at the highest quality, which is pretty quick for an A3 printer. Cost per print using Canon’s Pro Platinum photo paper is £1.86.