The Canon Pro 9500 Mark II is a serious printer for serious photographers that produces seriously good quality prints. But it also costs a serious amount of money compared to other similar models.

This printer uses 10 ink cartridges, with two blacks (one for matte and one for photo use) a grey ink and two special photo inks; a photo cyan and photo magenta. A full set of 10 ink cartridges will cost about $150, and the first cartridge to run out in our tests was the grey. We ran through two sets of cartidges in our test.

Performance (Read the full lab performance results at Printerinfo.com)
We found that the Pro 9500 Mark II excelled in most of our tests. We found that it could reproduce a very wide range of colors, did a great job of reproducing fine details and had very deep, dark blacks in our test prints. It also had very good color accuracy; most of our test colors were accurately reproduced, although we did see some problems with the medium and dark blues; they came out excessively dark, even after we calibrated the printer. We also found that the color gamut of the printer (the range of colors that it can reproduce) was extremely wide; the Pro 9500 Mark II managed to cover 65% of the Adobe RGB gamut, while other printers typically managed less than 50%. This is a very important factor for serious photographers, who want a printer to reproduce the wide range of colors that their cameras capture. We also found that the Pro 9500 Mark II excelled at producing deep, dark blacks; we found that it produced significantly deeper and darker blacks than most other printers.

If there is one thing that the Pro 9500 won't be accused of is being a fast printer: at the highest quality setting, a 13 x 19 inch print took a lengthy 11 minutes and 24 seconds to print out, and a 4 x 6 inch print took 1 minute and 50 seconds. That's much slower than the other printers that we've looked at, most of which took less than 10 minutes at most to produce a similar sized print.

Comparisons (Read the full lab performance results at Printerinfo.com)
The Pro 9500 Mark II is a more expensive printer than many other similarly featured ones; while it costs about $800, printers such as the Canon Pro 9000 Mark II and the Epson R1900 cost about $450-500. And the set of features that these printers offer is mostly similar; all can print at sizes of up to 13 x 19, although the Epson R1900 and the HP B8850 can print to larger banner sized paper up to 13 x 44 inches. The Epson also has the advantage of being able to print from a roll of paper (useful if you want to print a lot of banner-sized prints) and being able to print to inkjet-compatible DVDs.

But while there is not a lot of difference between the Pro 9500 Mark II and the others in terms of features, there is a significant difference in the quality of the prints. The Pro 9500 Mark II had a wider color range and deeper blacks than all of the other printers, and this may be thing that justifies the extra cost for many users.

For a more in-depth review, visit the Canon Pro 9500 Mark II review at our partner PrinterInfo.com