Printers

It's taken roughly 18 months for Canon to bring the Pixma Pro9500 printer to the market, which is surprising as so much of it is identical to the Pixma Pro9000, which launched in October 2006. However, the new model uses a completely different ink set that comprises 10 pigment-based ink cartridges, while the Pro9000 has eight dye-based inks. It also costs $300 more than the dye ink model.

It seems one reason for the delay was related to Canon's Lucia-branded pigment inks, which were introduced with the imagePROGRAF range of professional large format printers early in 2006. However, Canon has been tweaking the ink formulation since then so independent testing authority, Wilhelm Imaging Research has not yet released lightfastness ratings for them. As a result of preliminary testing, an announcement on the WIR website states they have expected lightfastness ratings in excess of 100 years.

The ten inks used in the Pro 9500 include the same colours as the Pro9000 - cyan, yellow, magenta, black, light cyan, light magenta, red, and green - with the addition of a matte black cartridge and a grey ink cartridge to improve B&W printing. Unlike the competing Epson Stylus Photo R2400, there's no need to swap cartridges when changing from glossy to matte paper. But you only get two levels of black, while the Epson printer has three.

Design & Controls
Physically, the Pro9500 is almost identical to the Pro9000 model. It has the same 66 x 35 cm footprint and paper in and out trays that increase its depth to about 80 cm when fully extended. The top-loading feeder has flip-up support for large sheets of paper and an adjustable guide that ensures the paper loads correctly for printing.

Heavyweight paper (up to 1.2mm thick) must be fed in manually via the front tray. The printer carries the paper back through a rear slot in a flat path and you need to allow at least 40 cm behind the printer for it to pass through.

 
On-screen instructions guide users through the paper loading process when using the front feed slot.

Power and USB 2.0 Hi-Speed ports are located at either end of the rear panel, while the top panel lifts up to reveal the printhead and ink tanks. The front panel carries the operating controls, which consist of an on/off button, resume/cancel button, front feed button and USB port. Two status lamps, covering power and alarm, sit left of the top two buttons.  No memory card slots are provided for direct printing but a digital camera can be connected via the USB port.
Set-up is similar to the Pro9000 model and takes less than an hour to complete. Canon supplies a rather scanty printed "Quick Start Guide" to help you with the set-up process. A comprehensive manual is provided on the software CD. This is well laid out and clearly explains all facets of printer operation. It also includes an ample Troubleshooting section.


Loading the ink cartridges is straightforward and each cartridge has a red LED that flashes when ink levels are low.

You begin by installing the print head and ink cartridges and loading some plain paper in the auto sheet feed tray. The next step is to install the driver software, which takes about seven minutes. Windows and Mac disks are supplied. When you connect the printer to your PC via a USB cable (not supplied) and switch the power on, the computer's OS should recognise the printer and install the drivers. You will be instructed to print two sheets of nozzle and head alignment tests before you can proceed. This takes about 10 minutes.


Software installation is also straightforward.

We found a few usage-related issues with the Pro9500 that may concern potential buyers. The most significant is the imposition of non-printable boundaries on all papers with the 'Fine Art' designation. Not only does this make it impossible to produce borderless prints on these papers; it also imposes a margin of at least 35mm along the narrow edges and 3.4 mm along the wide edges. You can side-step them by selecting a non-fine art paper type in the printer driver, but doing so prevents you from using your chosen paper's ICC profile.


The printer driver prevents users from making borderless prints on Fine Art papers. Note the (Margin 35) tag, which forces a 3.5 cm margin on the print.


The screen shot above shows the enforced margins along the shorter sides of an A3+ sheet of paper. The same margins are also applied to smaller sheets of paper.

Loading heavyweight papers via the front feed is also rather fiddly. It takes the driver just over 30 seconds to ready the printer so you can feed the paper in and another 30 seconds to feed the paper into position. Occasionally, the paper can be difficult to feed, especially if it is thick. We also found the driver to have some idiosyncratic notions of image placement at times when fine art papers were used (see illustration below) and we printed through Photoshop CS3.


We can't explain why the printer misaligned the image when we had set the image to print in the centre of the paper.

The only way to coax it into positioning the image centrally on the paper was to go back to the software and initiate the printing process again. Sometimes we had to change the paper setting then cancel the printing and restore the original settings.  This can prove frustrating and should not occur on a printer of this calibre.
Image adjustments provided in the driver are also rather scanty for an enthusiasts' printer. Checking the Vivid button boosts output colour saturation but there's no fine control over saturation levels, which means you can end up with either flat-looking prints if you don't use the Vivid setting or overly vibrant colours if you do. Monochrome adjustments in the printer driver are similarly basic a poor match for the controls provided in Epson's Advanced B&W driver.


A limited range of colour an tonal adjustments is provided - although you can select Windows Image Color Management and choose between Standard (sRGB) and Adobe RGB colour spaces.

Another issue concerns ink level warnings, which are very imprecise in the Canon driver. Unlike Epson's drivers, which provide low ink level warnings that indicate the percentage of ink remaining all the way down to 5%, Canon's driver simply issues a warning that 'ink is running low'. We estimate this starts when more than 20% of the ink remains as we were able to make seven monochrome prints and five colour prints at A4 size after the warning that the grey ink was running out first appeared.


Ink level graphs are too small to be really useful and the information about inks gives no indication of how much remains in each cartridge.

Part of the problem is that the graph is simply too small. Even HP's driver provides a much larger graph, thereby providing users with a better estimate of how much ink remains. With the Canon driver, you can't estimate how many prints you might be able to make before the cartridge runs dry so some users may be tempted to change cartridges while some ink remains. As the major part of the cost of inkjet cartridges is the delivery mechanism (not the ink), we feel this lack of information puts the Pro 9500 at a disadvantage against its main rivals.
The default driver setting is for Photo Paper Plus Semi-gloss paper, which delivered good results for most images we printed. Unfortunately, when you wish to print on other papers you must change the setting each time you make a new print. It's wise to check the 'Preview before printing' in the printer driver to ensure you match the driver settings to the paper you're using. The need to repeatedly check all printer settings can be irritating at times but it's essential as the driver for the printer we reviewed frequently returned to its default settings for no apparent reason.

It's important to preview before pritnign as driver settings are sometimes restored to the defaults, which may not match the paper you are using.

We found an interesting anomaly in the printer driver's Page Setup settings. Despite being an A3+ (329 x 483 mm) printer, the driver actually supports a paper size of 431.8 x 558.8 mm, which is almost A2 size. So, if you have a roll of paper that's 431.8 mm wide, you can simply cut off about 560 mm and feed it in through the top feeder. However, no provision is made for using roll paper.


The largest paper you can select is almost A2 size.

Workflow management is identical to the Pro9000 since both printers have the same software bundle. The printer is supplied with a full set of ink cartridges, a CD-printing tray, a power cord and 12 months warranty. No USB cable is provided. The Pro9500 's driver also supports ICC profiles.

ICC profile instructions.

Running Costs
At $25.50 each, purchasing a complete set of inks for the Pro9500 will set you back $255. Fortunately, the cartridges are individually replaceable as ink usage varies by colour. In our tests, the first to be depleted was the grey cartridge, with the photo magenta and photo cyan shortly after. By this time, the ink levels on the photo black, yellow, cyan, red and green were roughly half way down the bar graph.
We were able to make 49 A4 prints and 13 A3+ prints before this occurred. On the basis of our tests, we estimate the ink cost for an A4 print is approximately $2.50, while an A3+ print is around $6. Paper costs vary widely. A 20-sheet pack of Canon's Matte Photo paper costs $17.95, while the Fine Art Photo Rag paper sells for $50.95 for 20 sheets and the Fine Art "Museum Etching" for $77.95.
When you move to A3+ size, a 20-sheet pack of Glossy Photo paper can be bought for $33.25, with matte paper selling for $44.95 and Professional High Gloss paper at $66.36. The fine art papers are significantly more expensive, with Photo Rag priced at $151 for 20 A3+ sheets and Museum Etching at $217.
Power consumption is relatively low, compared with HP's Photosmart B9180 model, which the manufacturer recommends should be left on continuously and consumes about 10 Watts when it is idle.  In standby mode, the Pro9500 only draws 1.8 Watts from the mains, dropping to one Watt when it's turned off. When printing it uses 20 Watts, which is quite conservative.

Our Tests
Most prints in our test were made through Photoshop and the Pro9500 worked equally well with both CS2 and CS3. As with the Pro9000 model, the Pro9500 is supplied with Easy-PhotoPrint Pro, a plug-in for Photoshop CS2, which provides a range of adjustments. Via this plug-in you can select several colour management pre-sets, including Photo Colour, the default colour setting for Canon printers, and Linear Tone, which is designed to reproduce the image as it appears on your monitor.
You can also convert colour images to greyscale via this plug-in and choose from Cool Tone, Black/White, Warm Tone and a Custom setting that lets you adjust tonality via sliders in the Colour Balance window. Colour ring-around prints (designated 'Pattern Print' in the user interface) can also be made through Easy-PhotoPrint Pro (although at the expense of using a whole sheet of paper).
On the whole, we found it easier - and less wasteful of media - to print test strips via Photoshop CS3. On average we were able to fit between eight and 10 test strips per sheet of paper and, with a properly-calibrated monitor, seldom required more than one test per print. Consequently, only one sheet of paper was used for testing up to 10 images instead of a sheet per shot.
You can also print from Canon's Raw file converter, Digital Photo Professional. However, unless you use DPP for any required adjustments to the image, there's no significant advantage as the interface takes you directly to the printer driver. (DPP can also take you directly to Photoshop and you can print from there.)


The dialog box for printing from Digital Photo Professional (the Raw file converter supplied with Canon's EOS DSLR cameras). 

Performance
The Pixma Pro9500 is the quietest of the A3+ desktop printers on the current market. It's also the slowest, being positively snail-like when compared with the Pro9000 - but only a little slower than its rivals. We recorded the following average printing times:
A4 print with a 1.0-1.5 cm unprinted border:
Standard quality - 3 minutes and 46 seconds
High quality -  6 minutes and 24 seconds
A3+ print with 2.0 to 3.5 cm unprinted border:
Standard quality - 10 minutes and 55 seconds
High quality - 15 minutes and 29 seconds

While the test printer was capable of delivering excellent results, we found it rather perplexing to use and evaluate. This was largely because print quality was much more dependent on matching the image to the appropriate paper than we have encountered with other printers we've reviewed. Low contrast colour images retained their subtle nuances when printed on Canon's Photo Paper Plus Semi-gloss and Photo Paper Plus Glossy media but looked rather flat and rather 'chalky' when printed on Fine Art Paper Premium Matte paper and Fine Art Paper "Photo Rag". Contrasty images were a tad harsh on the Glossy paper and, interestingly, also on Canon's Fine Art Paper "Museum Etching", which has a textured surface and appears to be optical brightener free.
Monochrome prints on Premium Matte paper were also a little flat but on glossy and semi-gloss papers they had plenty of punch and they looked really beautiful on "Museum Etching". No colour casts were observed in any of the monochrome prints we made. However, prints made on both glossy and semi-gloss papers showed evidence of gloss differential (variations in surface reflectivity), under directional lighting. We also found evidence of bronzing on the darkest areas of several glossy prints.
Reproduction of detail was generally very good and we found the Pro9500 to be capable of reproducing a full range of tones when image and paper were well matched. The finer nuances of skin tones were particularly well handled. No significant paper handling problems occurred during our tests.  

Conclusion
We have some reservations about Canon's Pixma Pro9500, although it can certainly produce excellent prints under the right conditions. The lack of controls in the printer driver - particularly for B&W printing - puts this printer at a disadvantage against its rivals.  On the plus side, though, it's cheaper than either of them and, like them, supports ICC profiles, enabling users to print on third-party, fine art media.
Ink cartridges are easily installed and replaced and they come with a minimum of packaging. The cartridges have red LEDs that flash when ink levels are low, making it easy to identify which ones need replacing - even when you're in a hurry. The printer itself is very solidly built. It's designed to operate from either a computer or a PictBridge-enabled device. However, there are no card slots and no facilities for network or wireless connectivity.
Structurally and design-wise the Pro 9500 will appeal to its target audience, which will include serious enthusiasts and entry-level professionals. Performance-wise it will meet expectations as long as users find the right paper types to print their pictures on. The table below compares selected features of the Pro9500 with its main rivals. 

 * when printing
** estimate

Printer type: On-demand inkjet
Resolution: 4800 x 2400 dpi
Paper sizes: LDR, LDR+, A3+, A3, A5, B5, A4, B4, Letter, Legal, Photo cards (4 x 6", 4 x 8", 5 x 7", 8 x 10")
Max. paper weight: up to 1.2mm via front feed (ASF: 64-105g/m², Photo Paper Plus Glossy 270g/m²)
Ink cartridges: PGI-9 PM/PBK/MBK/PC/GY/M/Y/C/G/R - Pigment ink tanks

Ink yield: 11" x 14" image: PGI-9PM - approx. 37, PGI-9PBK - approx. 43, PGI-9MBK - approx. 219, PGI-9PC - approx. 44, PGI-9GY - approx. 37, PGI-9M - approx. 144, PGI-9Y - approx. 125, PGI-9C - approx. 79, PGI-9G - approx. 160, PGI-9R - approx. 104
Interfaces: USB 2.0 Hi-Speed, Camera Direct: Direct Print Port (PictBridge)
Power consumption: Max: 20W6, Standby: 1.8W, Off: 1W
Acoustic noise: 36dB(A) in best quality mode
Dimensions (wxhxd): 660 x 354 x 191 mm (with paper trays and other extensions closed)
Weight: Approx. 15.4 kg