Professional Photo Printing with the Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II
The PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II is Canon's latest and top of the class professional A3-size home photo printer. We put it through our tests and find out if it measures up.
Introduction
Recently launched in late June, the Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II is the update to - you guessed it - the original Pro9500 released back in 2007. Revisions include Ambient Light Correction technology, which adjusts the print colors based on what kind of environment the print will eventually hang in so that the colors will stay the same. This feature is very much like the Auto White Balance in your digital camera changes the hues of your photos so that the colors look right under different shooting conditions. With that said, we bring it through a series of tests to see how this A3-size professional home photo printer measures up.
The Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II professional home photo printer.
Design & Handling
Being an A3 printer means that the Pro9500 Mark II takes up a lot of table space, plus you'll have to factor in some extra space at the back. That's where A3 paper is pushed back to when printing from the front tray. Fortunately the Pro9500 Mark II has a couple of small wheels built into the lower back so you can tilt the 15kg printer easily and wheel it around. Its matte finish and beautifully clean lines makes it an unobtrusive minimalistic slab which won't be out of place in any avant-garde artist's workspace (with the gold PIXMA logo adding a dash of sophistication).
The gold PIXMA logo adds an extra dash of class to an already classy-looking device.
Canon has kept the design minimal, these are the only buttons you get on the Pro9500 Mark II.
This is what the Pro9500 Mark II's front tray looks like when printing below A3 size prints.
To switch the Pro9500 Mark II to A3 printing mode, you'll have to jiggle the tray up and lock it in. Doesn't look all too different, does it?
The closed back of the Pro9500 Mark II when the A3 printing tray is not in use.
To print A3, you have to open up the back cover. This lets the paper slide all the way back and keeps it flat while printing.
A pair of holders spring out to help hold the A3-sized paper in place. You'll have to factor in the extra space at the back whenever you want to print A3.
Two wheels on the lower back of the Pro9500 Mark II help you shift the 15.2kg printer around easily if you need to make room at the back for A3 printing.
Performance
The Pro9500 Mark II is serious about black and white printing with three dedicated monochrome inks. While a combination of CMYK inks should suffice for B&W photos on less sophisticated models, the varying levels of grays in those prints are produced from a mixture of colors and thus the final printout may not be purely black and white. Furthermore, using color inks to produce black and white prints isn't exactly cost effective. With the Gray, Matte Black and Photo Black inks on the Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II, you'll be assured of the integrity of your black and white photos.
And gorgeous those black and white photo prints were from our tests, as well as the full color photo prints. The colors were immaculate, the details precise and the pictures exuded vibrancy. We were surprised that the printer even showed us nuances of our test photos that we hadn't even noticed before.
Printing in sizes below A3 is business as normal, feeding paper from the rear tray. Printing at A3 and A3+ requires some re-adjustment of the front feeding tray, which takes some figuring out as the software instructions aren't too clear. As mentioned, the paper will feed through to the back so it never gets bent while printing.
Color prints are flawless.
B&W prints are gorgeous with the dedicated monochrome inks insuring true blacks and whites.
The Pro9500 Mark II has frequent cleaning cycles; this is done to prevent the inks from settling and clogging the nozzles. What you'll notice are pauses in-between prints and the printer shaking the table a little - this is actually a good thing to wait for as it helps lengthen the lifespan of your inks and ensures quality of print.
While photo prints are immaculate, the document prints suffer from slowness. Even though the quality is also flawless, we doubt that many would want to wait near eight minutes for a ten page print. Besides, that's not what this printer was designed for. At the same time, using this class of printer for printing documents strikes us as overkill; rather like driving the new Ferrari to get your groceries. One more thing: the Pro9500 Mark II is amazingly quiet as a mouse when printing.
Text prints are full and solid.
Task | Timing |
10 A4 pages of black text (doc) | 8 min 22 sec |
10 A4 pages of text with colored graphics (doc) | 8 min 30 sec |
8 A4 pages of text with mono graphics (pdf) | 7 min 6 sec |
One 4R Photodisc photo (bordered) | 1 min 38 sec |
One 4R Photodisc photo (borderless) | 2 min 2 sec |
One 4R grayscale photo (bordered) | 1 min 35 sec |
One 4R grayscale photo (borderless) | 1 min 58 sec |
One A4 Photodisc photo (bordered) | 4 min 30 sec |
One A4 Photodisc photo (borderless) | 5 min 04 sec |
One A4 grayscale photo (bordered) | 4 min 17 sec |
One A4 grayscale photo (borderless) | 4 min 56 sec |
One A3+ Photodisc photo (bordered) | 8 min 22 sec |
One A3+ Photodisc photo (borderless) | 9 min |
One A3+ grayscale photo (bordered) | 8 min 48 sec |
One A3+ grayscale photo (borderless) | 8 min 20 sec |
For print tasks, timing started when the printer started to feed paper and stopped when the last page was printed. 80gsm A4 paper was used for document printing. Documents were printed with quality set at Normal. Photos were printed with Fine Art Paper Premium Matte and Photo Paper Pro Platinum with quality at Normal. Timings may vary with different system configurations.
Conclusion
While the Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II is as good as it gets for photo printing at home with its excellent quality, it can be a pricey proposition. The printer itself is S$1299 with each ink cartridge at S$24.90 and it runs 10 different inks. Like other inkjet printers, it won't work with even just one cartridge missing, so you'll have to keep all 10 freshly stocked. But in the end, you do get what you pay for with top quality prints.
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