Photo Review Reviews section

Canon Pixma Pro9000

8.5 Rating

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.

Canon PIXMA iP100

8 Rating

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).

Canon Pixma MP800

8.5 Rating

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.

Canon imagePROGRAPH iPF5100

8.8 Rating

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.

Pantone hueyPRO

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’.

Pantone huey

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.

Lexar Professional UDMA Dual Slot Reader

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.

GretagMacbeth Eye-One Photo

GretagMacbeth’s Eye-One Photo is designed for photographers who need consistent, reliable colour for monitors and other digital imaging equipment. It is supplied with GretagMacbeth’s Eye-One Match 3 software, a Mini ColorChecker, USB cable, ambient light measurement head, ruler for chart measurement in scan mode, scan target, monitor holders and spot colour guide. Like the Eye-One Display 2, which was reviewed in issue 24, a clip-on diffuser is included for measuring the ambient light in your working area.

Kaiser Baas PhotoScanner

8 Rating

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.