Product Reviews

Inkjet printers have been capable of producing prints that can pass for photographs for some time. So new products have a lot to live up to, and it's with this in mind that Canon has launched the i990.

It's big for an A4 printer, needing a full 60cm of wall to desk-front breathing space, and almost half a metre side to side. This is in part down to the size of the input and output trays, but mostly because with a seven-colour ink system it has to pass a lot of mechanics over the page.

Printers have traditionally made do with just four colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and these generally produce an acceptable colour gamut. This is particularly true in the business environment where graphs, not graphics, are the order of the day. It has long been recognised that this is too coarse for photos though, and adding light variants of cyan and magenta allows for smoother gradients and more convincing skin tones. It also helps overcome 'knock-out', where part of an image is too light for a conventional four-colour printer to fill in, resulting either in areas left blank, or obviously sparsely spotted with ink dots.

The seventh colour in the i990 is red, which should produce warmer images; reds and oranges created using a yellow/magenta mix are traditionally too cold, since magenta shifts towards the blue/violet colour space. One fringe benefit of including a red ink is that the yellow and magenta cartridges are depleted less quickly.

Photo printing is particularly ink-hungry, so anything that keeps down costs is a welcome innovation. To this end, Canon has priced its individual inks at £8.99 each, which equates to around £60 for the set. This is on a par with the competition, and you'll rarely need to replace them all at once, which means costs should be spread over time. They're moulded from transparent plastic, which is a nice touch, as it lets you visually gauge how much ink you have left if you'd

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rather not trust the software.

The i990 has the longest head on any printer, and with 5376 nozzles the highest density, too. Drop sizes are down to two picolitres each which, while fatter than the 1.5pl of Epson's R800, is still too small for the naked eye to see. This gives it a top resolution of 4800 x 2400dpi; ideal for photo printing. We found pictures slightly oversaturated, which could be exacerbated visually by the use of the warmer red ink in the print head. This can be fixed by reducing the saturation of the original image before printing, though unless you're working at a highly professional level, you may prefer the slight kick the warmer output gives images.

It's a quick worker, printing three borderless A4 photos in a little over five minutes, all of a quality we'd be happy to hang on the wall. The images were all slightly cropped, as to achieve edge-to-edge printing the driver has to expand the original so that it overlaps the edges of the page. A recessed sponge catches this overprint ink.

The likelihood of you wanting to print A4 photos on a regular basis is fairly small, which is why the bundled caddy for 6 x 4in photo sheets is a welcome addition. It clips onto the input hopper, reducing its A4 capacity from 150 pages to 50.

Text quality is fair, but with the black tank no bigger than any of the individual colours, we wouldn't recommend buying this printer for heavy text printing. Even so, we want the peace of mind a good all-rounder brings, and this is perhaps the only area in which the i990 falters. On photocopy paper, the characters were less crisp or black than you'd expect from a less specialised printer.

It's fast, dropping the final page of our test text document into the output tray in just over three minutes. That averages around 18 seconds per page, significantly faster than the Epson R800's 30 seconds per page.

A front-mounted USB port allows for direct printing from PictBridge-compatible cameras without your Mac intervening. We tested this with the Nikon Coolpix 8700 (p24) and print speeds did drop; the camera just isn't capable of passing the data quickly enough. Canon assures us that this problem should be minimised with its own cameras.

£299 may not be loose change, but the i990 remains a worthwhile investment. Photo output is superb, with the caveat that the printer is guilty of slight oversaturation. If you're after a jack of all trades, look elsewhere, but if you want a master of one - photo printing - consider the i990.