Inspiring ways to improve your photos
Inspiring ways to improve your photos
Photo Review Reviews section
A pigment-ink version of Canon’s popular Pixma Pro9000 A3+ printer (reviewed in issue 31).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.
An update to Canon’s popular PIXMA Pro9000 dye ink desktop A3+ printer for photographers who wish to produce durable, exhibition quality prints.Although originally scheduled for release in July, it was late October before we received the PIXMA Pro9000 Mark II printer to review. Interestingly, very little has changed in the three years since we reviewed the Pro9000. Even the RRPs have remained the same over the three-year period – which could be seen as remarkable.
A professional-quality A3+ printer with an easy interface that allows users to produce excellent prints with minimal hassles.The Pixma Pro9000 is the first of the long-awaited Canon professional A3+ desktop printers to be released locally. Featuring the proprietary FINE (Full-photolithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering) printhead technology, it has an eight-colour individual ink tank system that uses the latest ChromaLife100 dye inks. Canon claims prints produced with these inks on certain Canon papers will have an archival life span of 100 years, which is comparable with some pigment inks.
A portable general-purpose inkjet printer that can produce photo prints that match ‘lab quality’.Designed for portability, Canon’s PIXMA iP100 printer promises to produce ‘photo lab quality prints’, although its specifications are more attuned to office printing. It’s a four-colour printer with separate cartridges for black pigment ink and dye-based colour inks (cyan, magenta and yellow plus a photo black to improve darker tones in photo prints). The ChromaLife 100 colour inks promise long-lasting photo prints on Canon’s photo papers (although no test results have been posted on the Wilhelm Research website).
Multi-function printer/copier/scanners are a great concept for digital photo hobbyists with limited office space and restricted budgets and very handy for home offices so it’s great to find some that do a decent job when used for imaging tasks. Canon’s new Pixma MP800 is designed with digital photographers in mind. As well as using the new ChromaLife 100 inks, it offers easy direct printing from compatible digital cameras, memory cards, mobile phones or film.
An efficient A2 printer for professional photographers who want a high-volume workhorse that can produce affordable, exhibition-quality prints. Canon’s imagePROGRAPH iPF5100 has been designed for a production environment and combines rugged construction with sophisticated engineering plus features to satisfy demanding photographers. Using an improved pigment ink system, it produces prints on papers up to 17 inches (431.8 mm) wide delivering a wide colour gamut plus excellent lightfastness and colour stability.
Superficially, Pantone’s new hueyPRO resembles the original huey that we reviewed last month. The colorimeter itself has the same structure as the original huey, with a bank of eight suckers to hold it on the screen and three apertures to allow light from the monitor to pass through to the measurement cells. The software appears to have been upgraded, with the addition of three ‘new colour patches’ that were added to 26 on the original device’s calibration process ‘for precise accuracy’.
If you’ve been put off buying a colorimeter for calibrating your monitor because devices cost too much, Pantone’s huey could change your mind. The kit consists of the measurement device itself (which is roughly 100 mm long and about as thick as a marker pen), a desktop cradle, USB extension cable, a pack of two Klear Screen monitor wipes and a 100 x 100 mm ‘Micro-Chamois’ cloth. A software disk and Quick Start guide are included and it’s all packaged in a handsome double box.
A fast, portable reader for the latest high-speed CF and SD memory cards.We’ve been using Lexar’s Professional UDMA dual slot memory card reader for a few months and have been very impressed by its compact size, sensible design and operational efficiency. With a 72 x 65 mm footprint and a weight of just under 67 grams, it’s small enough to pack into a laptop bag and takes up very little desk space, making it ideal for photographers who work in the studio and/or on location.
A compact desktop scanner that digitises photo prints and documents and saves them to an SD card.Kaiser Baas is a company that develops products to solve common digital lifestyle problems for non-specialist consumers. Among its offerings are devices as diverse as digital photo frames, image and sound converters (including scanners), digital TV tuners, portable digital radios, memory card readers and road recorders. The PhotoScanner is the latest in a line of image conversion products that includes two film scanners and a video-to-DVD converter.
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