Mac Creative > Reviews > A3 colour photo printers > Canon Pixma Pro9000

Canon Pixma Pro9000

Canon Pixma Pro9000
  • Manufacturer: Canon (http://www.canon.co.uk)
  • Pros: Fast, extremely quiet, print heads can be replaced, straight path for thicker material easy to use, high-quality prints, prints right up to the edge
  • Cons: Ugly, large, heavy, no supplied USB cable, installer takes over the screen stopping you from getting on with other things
  • Price: £499
  • Star rating: 0 Editors Choice

The Canon Pixma Pro9000 is no looker, that’s for sure – the plain oblong box looks more like a coffin for a small dog than a sexy piece of industrial design. It’s also remarkably heavy, and you might want to consider working out at the gym before moving it around. Canon calls it “robust” and it certainly exudes a kind of steely determination that suggests the printer just wants to roll its sleeves up and get printing.

The inkjet printer – or bubble jet, as Canon prefers to call it – uses eight different printing inks. As well as the usual CMYK inks, the Pro9000 uses pale cyan, pale magenta, red and green. This greatly increases the printer’s colour gamut, improving the colour accuracy and ability to capture fine details. By working in tandem with the company’s own paper, Canon claims that prints can rival the fidelity and depth of positive film and will resist fading for up to a hundred years.

We were disappointed to discover that there was no USB cable supplied, which, frankly, is a bit cheap. Not everyone has a spare lead knocking around, and we were forced to take the cable from another printer. The application that installed the printer’s driver was one of the clunkiest bits of software we’ve ever experienced and insisted on sitting on top of every other application, preventing us from using the Mac while it whirred away doing its thing.

Although Canon has clearly decided that design awards are for girls, everything installed correctly and that was the end of our beef with the unit because in use the printer is a dream. The Pixma Pro9000 is whisper-quiet and speedy, knocking out borderless A3 prints at a resolution of 4,800 x 2,400dpi in less than a minute and a half. The quality was simply stunning, with rich blacks and smooth graduations in colour. We burned through all the supplied paper in around half an hour printing a variety of images, and each one looked better than the last. With the Pro9000, Canon seemed to reach that sweet spot where neither speed nor quality are compromised.

This product is part of our A3 colour photo printers group product review. Other products in this group are:

 

Photosmart Pro B9180

  • Star rating: 0

 

Stylus Photo R2400

  • Star rating: 0

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