Canon Pixma Pro9500 Mark II Review

Canon is famous for offering series updates to its high-end imaging products rather than completely refreshing them. The latest example of this behavior? The Canon Pixma Pro9500 Mark II. A wide-format photo inkjet designed for working photographers, graphics pros, and serious hobbyists, the latest iteration of the Pro9500 builds on the original's success, with a ten-tank pigment ink system, borderless printing up to 13x19, and Canon's Ambient Light Correction system.

It all adds up to a serious printer with serious capabilities that should appeal to serious photographers – or at least, to those who can spring for its serious price.

CANON PIXMA PRO9500 MARK II SPECIFICATIONS

• Print speeds: 8x10 in approx. 4 mins., 11x14 in approx. 8 mins.
• Print resolution: up to 4800 x 2400 dpi
• Ten color pigment-based individual ink tank system
• Ambient light correction technology
• 4-in-1, 2-in-1 printing
• Two way paper feeding (front, rear trays)
• Hi-speed 2.0 USB, PictBridge connection
• EnergyStar qualified (Generation Green product)

BUILD AND DESIGN
On a desk, the Mark II version of the Pro9500 doesn't look much different from the original unit that Canon rolled out a few years ago: it's a hulking, gray and black two-tone box. For the uninitiated, the Pro9500 (like most 13x19 photo printers) may look like a standard inkjet, but the scale is fundamentally different. By our measurements, with all trays folded up, the Pro9500 measures 30 by 14 by 7.5 inches; compare that to a standard 8.5x11 photo-inkjet (Canon's ip4600, for instance), which comes in at roughly half that size.

Hence, you'll need some dedicated desk space – or an entire desk – to make use of the Pro9500 Mark II. With all trays deployed, plan on setting aside about 30 by 40 inches for the device. Presumably, if you're shopping for a printer in this class, you have a dedicated photo work space and won't be taken aback by the machine's bulk.

As noted, the device utilizes two trays: a multi-sheet feeder in the back, and a single-sheet feed integrated into the output tray on the front of the device. Both trays can accommodate paper up to 13x19 (A3+), allowing you to make photo and other fine-art prints on a variety of media. In terms of thickness, the auto feeder is speced to support media up to around 100 gsm, and handle "Canon-approved" stock as thick as 300 gsm.

In testing the Pro9500 with several photo stocks, we had no trouble utilizing any of Canon's heavyweight fine-art papers in the machine's auto feeder, and with the appropriate settings, the Mark II handled 280 gsm (100 lb) art stock from other manufacturers with no difficulty as well.

Heavier papers require use of the front single-sheet feeder, with the Pixma supporting stock up to a stout 1.2 mm thick when loading from the front. The sheet feeder, which requires that you select the front tray when printing your file, then follow on-screen prompts to manually feed the sheet into the output tray for pickup, can be a little finnicky to adapt to if you're not familiar with Canon's feed procedure. One of our testers had trouble with improper sheet alignment and feed jamming early on, but everyone who used the Mark II quickly got the hang of the single-sheet feed procedure.

Once the sheet is loaded, the printer in essences "backs" the sheet through the output tray and then feeds it forward while printing. This arrangement means that the stock is never even slightly bent during the feed process – an important consideration for heavy or coated papers – but also requires that you leave enough clearance behind the machine to prevent the loaded sheet (which hangs out the back of the printer on a separate drop-down tray) from hitting a wall or other obstruction and getting bent or folded. Ultimately, while it's nice to be able to feed single sheets from the front side of the machine, the process doesn't really save much space compared to rear-load sheet feeders.

For serious photographers, graphic designers, and other visual artists, the ability to print at 13x19 is, of course, the primary appeal of a printer like the Pro9500, but it's also worth noting that the Pro9500 can print bordered or borderless prints at sizes all the way down to 4x6. Sure, you could even use the Pro9500 to print home/home office documents if you wanted to – it certainly has the flexibility. But given the cost of ink (and of the device itself!) we're not sure why you would. At its core, the Pro9500 is a photo/art printer designed for serious amateur and professional photo and graphics use, and its focused features set – you won't find many of the traditional "frills" seen in home/home office inkjets these days – reflects this fact.

Under the hood, the Pro9500 Mark II, like the original version, uses Canon's ten-tank Lucia pigment ink system. Compared to dye-based inks used in most consumer and even many prosumer photo printers, pigment inks promise true commercial-quality contrast and color depth, as well as distinctive archival advantages over most dye-based inks. Canon has also been touting the capabilities of this ink set, which uses a pair of black inks (photo and matte blacks) plus gray, for black and white prints.

The tanks install into Canon's user-replaceable printhead with FINE nozzle technology. The printhead, which appears to be identical to the one used in the original Pro9500 based on its specs, produces ultra-fine 3 picoliter droplets.

Buttons and controls on the printer itself are minimal at most: you'll find power, feed, and sheet load buttons on the printer's front deck, as well as a PictBridge port, but the majority of the Pro9500's functions are handled via Canon's supplied software – which controls options like the much talked-about Ambient Light Correction feature. Likewise, connection to your Mac or PC is via USB only – there's no networking option. While those who use multiple graphics machines on a home network, or work in a small creative-services office, might have appreciated some built-in network connectivity this time around, the Pro9500's spare, simple, and easy-to-connect approach is standard for this class of machines, and it's unlike that serious graphics users will mind much one way or the other.

For a quick tour of everything the Pro9500 offers, have a look at our video review:

PERFORMANCE

Set Up
Once you find a place to stow the Pro9500, set up really couldn't be much simpler. Hook up your USB connection, install whatever combination of Canon's supplied software and drivers suits your fancy, and you're basically ready to print. In fact, snapping the print head and ten (individually wrapped) ink tanks into place will probably take longer than the computer-side setup required to get your Pixma Pro recognized by your machine. Total time from cutting open the box to sending the first print? Assuming you've installed ink tanks before and don't need to fumble around to find Canon's quick-start guide, about ten minutes.

When it comes to software installation, though, you do have some decisions to make. The Pro9500 includes Canon's Easy PhotoPrint EX software as a standalone application for both Mac OS X and the common versions of Windows, but also supplies the software's same basic print setup functions (in addition to Ambient Light Correction) as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. The standalone application offers some basic function walkthroughs and even simple image editing tools, but it seems likely that most users in the market for a $900 photo printer will opt to use the Photoshop plug-in if they don't simply bypass Canon's software altogether.

In both cases, installation went off without a hitch, with our Vista 64-bit/Photoshop CS3 test machine giving us no trouble installing either tool.

Ease of Use
As a single-function inkjet, usability is pretty straightforward with the Pro9500. After a quick driver install, we put our review unit to the test, sending test prints from several common image editing and workflow applications – Photoshop (with and without Canon's output plug-in), Bibble 4.9, Corel PaintShop Pro, Lightroom, and even more consumer-focused editors like Photoshop Elements and the supplied Windows Photo Gallery. Not surprisingly, we had no problems getting the output, in terms of size and quality, we were looking for regardless of what application we chose (though this experiment did make it clear that Canon's output plug-in provides a better range of controls than the stock driver settings afford).

The most difficult part of using the Pro9500, in fact, may be figuring out how to operate the front pass-through feeder for heavier papers. If you're coming from other Canon wide-format printers, the process is the same, and for everyone else, a series of on-screen prompts walk you through the setup process – which requires swiveling the front output tray into the feed position and manually feeding your stock into position.

As noted previously, it's easy to misalign the paper at first if you're not familiar with the process, but in most cases the Pro9500 will simply reject the misfed sheet and ask you to try again. In burning through an entire stack of test prints on Canon's thick and textured Museum Etching paper, we only had one instance where the printer jammed while attempting to print on an obvious misaligned sheet.

Performance Tests
The original Pro9500 was well regarded for its print speed, but while the technology has changed little, both Canon's official numbers and our tests indicate that the Mark II has lost a step or two in the speed department compared to its sibling. Printing a 13x19 borderless print out of Photoshop CS3 at standard quality, the new Pro9500 took 10 minutes, 20 seconds from a "cold," first-print-of-the-morning start to output a color image on semi-gloss photo paper. Subsequent prints knocked a couple of minutes off the total time, with our best color print times at the Pro9500's maximum image size coming in the seven-minute range. For smaller sizes at standard quality, expect 8x10 color prints to run in the two-minute range, with the Pro9500 cranking out 4x6 images in around 50 seconds, give or take.

The Pro9500 excels at grayscale printing, but you end up paying a time penalty to take advantage of the full range of its black and white capabilities. Printing on thick textured paper at highest quality in the output console's dedicated black and white mode, the Mark II timed in at 14:54 for a bordered 13x19 print. While the quality is exceptionally good, this kind of speed puts the Pro9500 at about par for the course among its peers in terms of speed.

When you're printing at the kind of sizes afforded by a machine like the Pro9500, ink usage is a serious concern. Factor in that Canon's Lucia pigment-based inks for this model average $20 to $25 per cartridge and calculating consumables usage becomes that much more important. In our case, after burning through 20 or so 13x19 test prints (roughly half of them black and whites), a handful of 8x10s, and a few smaller prints, the Pro9500's Photo Black tank started throwing up a low ink warning. Compared to other printers in this class we've looked at, this performance actually isn't as bad as it may sound at first to the casual observer: if you were printing mostly color images and always at 13x19, you could conceivable expect to get 40 or more prints out of a set of tanks before some required replacement – much better performance than we've seen from some competitive devices.

Finally, everyone who used the Mark II was impressed with just how quiet this machine is. Even without engaging Canon's speed-eating "Quiet Mode," the Pro9500's carriage barely raises its voice above a whisper. Measuring from three feet away, the Mark II rarely registered above the 40 db threshold of our sound pressure test equipment.

Print Quality
We'll get the obvious out of the way first: the Pixma Pro9500 Mark II makes exceptionally nice prints. As a dedicated, pro-grade photo inkjet with a near-$1000 price tag, there's no reason to expect anything less. But while Canon more than lives up to its claims of photo lab quality with this model, there are some nuanced points worth considering when discussing the Pro9500's print quality.

For color images, the Pro9500's pigment inks are vibrant and thick, providing an impressively wide color space to work in. It was appropriately easy to profile the Pro9500's output, and I was able to get nice and screen-accurate output results with minimal hassle – again, exactly what you'd expect from a photo printer in this class. With 4800x2400 dpi output, fine detail reproduction was excellent. Even more impressive, though, was the Pro9500's ability to capture subtle tonal gradations, even in areas of highly saturated color. Combined with the ability to handle thick, highly textured papers, these capabilities make the Mark II an excellent choice for fine-art prints as well: in reprinting some high-quality artwork scans for a friend, the printer impressed me with its ability to capture the fine texture of charcoal drawings, and the subtleties of pen-and-ink.

We also spent some time playing around with Canon's Ambient Light Correction tool in the Photoshop plug-in, and continue to be impressed with the straightforward usability of this simple but powerful feature: trying out several of the presets, I was pleased with how well the Pro9500's software was able to account for differences between daylight-balanced and tungsten sources in particular.

As with the original Pro9500, where the Mark II really shines is in printing black and whites. We've tested some inkjets with excellent monochrome capabilities, but the Pro9500 serves up some of the deepest blacks and smooth tonal transitions we've seen. On matte or semi-gloss paper, the results truly are commercial quality, making the Mark II perfectly suited for creating gallery prints or client deliverables.

Pros:

• Exceptional image quality
• Ultra-quiet operation
• Easy to set up, use

Cons:

• Print speeds down a notch from previous version
• Comparatively expensive

CONCLUSION
A near-$1000 photo printer shouldn't give you much to complain about, and on this score, the Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II is a resounding success. Professional photographers will appreciate its flexible media handling and straightforward output control, and hobbyists should find more than enough capabilities in this device's monochrome printing capabilities, especially, to keep them happy for a long time. Sure, we wish the speed was a little better, but everything else – from print quality, to ease of use, to its ink usage habits – meets or exceeds our expectations, even considering the steep (for enthusiasts, anyway) price.

Given this price, though, it's worth asking how the Pro9500 Mark II performs compared to wide-format printers in the next tier down, including our current favorite value, the Epson R1900, and the soon-to-be-reviewed Canon Pro9000. While pros may prefer the Pro9500's no-nonsense approach, the R1900 in particular offers the versatility of being able to print on just about anything you can feed into it – which ups its stock with artists and graphics pros – as well as pigment-ink performance and durability for a little more than half the cost of a Pro9500.

All in all, we still like the Pro9500 a lot. While we're splitting hairs at this point, it may offer the best overall image quality – the closest thing to that photo-lab print experience – that you can get in a printer that's reasonably within the budget of the serious enthusiast. Is this distinction, plus the Pixma's other subtle advantages, enough to put it at the top of the heap among photo inkjets? For $200 less, I'd say yes. As it stands, you (and your wallet) will have to decided for yourself.

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY
The Canon Pixma Pro9500 Mark II is available now for the suggested retail price of $849.99 through the Canon eStore and licensed retailers. 

• PMA 2009: Canon presents Pixma Pro9500, Pro9000
• Canon Pixma Pro9500 Mark II first look