Compared to

When thinking about buying a printer, we inevitably have the nagging thought 'are we buying the best printer available', which is a valid question and probably more so when you're looking to splash out on an expensive A3 printer. Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about this a lot, as a reviewer I am in the enviable the position of having tried and tested all the latest gear. But after looking at the printed results from the Epson R2400, HP B9180 and now the Canon Pro 9000, I am left in a bit of a quandary.

The one thing that is coming through very clearly is that for the last year or so all the printers that I have used are producing excellent results. They are all accurately reproducing my digital files, with terrific colours. Inkjet monochrome printing (B/W) has also reached new heights, the prints are every bit as good as anything I have produced in the darkroom. Now if a printer is producing prints with a slight colour mismatch, then we can alter these easily enough via either Photoshop, or in the Canon Pro 9000 case, via the excellent Photoshop plug-in Easy-PhotoPrint Pro. I will cover this plug-in in greater detail on page 6 or 7.

So what should we be looking for in a printer now?

The simple answer is, we should be looking for ease of use, minimum ink and paper wastage before we can accurately produce a photograph. To this end the Canon Pro 9000 succeeds hands down. The first print I produced was OK, the colours were vibrant, but suffered with the dreaded over -applied Canon Red. When printing from the new Photoshop plug-in, using the same file, the colours were poles apart. I did question a Canon spokesman about this and was told that the red is a result of market research carried out in Japan, people there prefer a well saturated look. I wish Canon could also do their market research in Europe and America. So let's take a close look at the Pro 9000 colour capabilities, I have used my second print for the samples.

Canon Pro 9000 @ 600 dpi	Canon Pro 9000 @ 1200dpi
HP B9180 @ 600 dpi	HP B9180 @ 1200 dpi
Epson R2400	Epson R1800
Canon iP8500 (A4)	Canon iP9950 (A3)
HP 8750 (A3)	Canon iP6700D (A4)
Epson 4000 (A2)	HP DJ90 (A2)

The original idea behind the close ups of Sophie's eyeball was to see the structure of the print dot. This was started when printers had 6 picolitre and larger drop sizes, but now that printers have a drop size of 1 or 2 pl (the Pro 9000 uses 2 pl), we can safely forget about seeing the print dots with the naked eye. Having said that, the Pro 9000 has the smoothest tone of all the printers on this page. The highly magnified 1200 dpi scan shows the print dot, yet all the eyelash details are still there.

The Canon Pro 9000 has a resolution of 4800 x 2400 (this means the ink drops can be placed with a minimum pitch of 1/4800 inch). I think the quality of reproduction is remarkable, especially when comparing this new generation printer with some of the older models.