Canon PIXMA Pro9000 > Reviews > Professionals printer

Author's product rating:   

Picture quality	Excellent
Printing speed	Slow
Colour sensitivity	Excellent
Ease of use	Very easy
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Bright A3 prints
Disadvantages:	Expensive compared to others in the market

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

A friend of mine, who sells photographic prints, has just purchased the Pro 9000 so that he could produce his own A3 prints. He was hoping that they would rival anything he could get from outside photo printers at a smaller cost. He was not disappointed.

The looks
Like all the current Pixma range, this unit is quite a stylish round cornered "box" with chrome buttons, being an A3 printer it is obviously rather wide, but being quite low and compact, compared to other manufacturers it is still a nice looking printer.

The set up
Quick and easy installation following the on screen instructions, which includes lots of software that most people who are in the market for this type of machine will probably not need or want. If this is the case you can choose to set up manually.

Performance
The printer uses 8 cartridges, the 4 usual cartridges of magenta, cyan, yellow and black plus the addition of red, green, photo cyan and photo magenta which is designed to enhance colour reproduction.

Print size is up to A3, in paperweights up to 300gm.
There is also a facility to copy straight onto compatible CD or DVD discs.

Speed is quite slow, although to be fair we are talking of A3 prints, which are printed there and then, you don't have to go out and collect them from a shop in the rain.

A3 photo print time is very nearly 3min 30seconds.

The finished prints are bright and lifelike with fine detail faithfully reproduced. Skin tones were accurate, but greyscales seem to have a slight warm (magenta) tinge to them. It might be advisable to set the colour/intensity setting to manual for these types of images, although auto works fine for everything else.

Price
The price varies (obviously) depending on where you purchase it from but I have seen it from between £413 and £470.

Canon ink cartridges, and I would suggest sticking with Canon, because they do a fabulous job are £8.99 each, so changing all 8 is not cheap.

Overall verdict
This printer produces bright, lifelike prints, but can be slow.
There are other A3 printers on the market that are cheaper and indeed quicker, but I am not sure there are any that gives you the finished article quite like this Canon. I would put up with the speed and the price just to get the quality of print that this printer turns out.