This is an A3+ format printer intended for high-quality photographic output. There was a dual purpose to our review, to expose the printer to our latest range of tests and to gather data for a book project. The crucial feature of the printer is its Lucia ink set. This is a full-pigment 10-colour set with excellent life/fade characteristics. Taking the fade characteristics from the Wilhelm Imaging testing we calculated average fade resistance across 15 Canson Infinity papers of 113 years for the Lucia, 150 years for Hewlett Packard and 75 years for Epson K3 UltraChrome. Although this is a two-fold span of 'life', the data is slightly vulnerable to error as it is based on a logarithmic Arrhenius plot – a tiny shift in the curve creates a large effect on the result. Suffice to say that fade resistance is far from the issue it used to be, when researching the data we came across some older work predicting lives of under two years for many ink sets!
The 9500 Mk II uses bubble-jet technology and has 'mobile' ink cartridges
(that is they move with the print head). This limits the cartridge size
because of the engineering challenge to accelerate, slow down and then
accelerate the entire block of cartridges for each pass of the head. In
practice this limits the ink cartridges to about 14ml, each giving a total
of 140ml for the full set. The Epson 3880, by way of example has 720ml of
ink in a full set of non-moving cartridges. Cartridges for the 9500 Mk II
are about £14 each (street price including VAT). The dent in your wallet
will be accordingly smaller, but you will need to restock more frequently
(and run the risk of going without more often).
Mechanical
The printer is physically very neat, especially when all the doors and trays
are stowed. It stands 660mm wide by 355mm deep by 193mm high. However, it
has a straight feed-through for heavy papers and you will require as much
space behind of the printer as ahead of it when using such media. The
printer weighs just 33 lb and is easily manhandled about. This is really
simple if all you need is to move back and forth across the desk, as little
rollers are thoughtfully provided. Assuming you keep a tidy desk (dream on
McNamee) you can trundled the unit back and forth with complete ease.
The Ink Set
The Lucia inks are fully pigmented and consist of:
Photo Black,
Cyan,
Matt Black,
Photo Cyan,
Grey,
Yellow,
Magenta,
Green,
Photo Magenta,
Red
It is reasonable to expect that the addition of a red and a green ink would
extend the gamut but our measurements did not uphold this. In the direct
comparison that we made with Epson K3 UltraChrome the Epson gamut was larger
by between 6% and 11.5% across a number of media, eg:
Set Up
This was trivially easy; we soon navigated our way about the Canon website
and collected the latest driver for our 64-bit system (the Windows 7 file
doubles for Vista 64-bit). The printer was instantly recognised and made
available in Photoshop CS4 64-bit. (Snow Leopard users remain out in the
cold, we understand that the issues plaguing the Epson driver are also true
for the Canon drivers – this is of some importance as it highlights that the
issue is between Adobe and Apple, not other parties!)
After a bit of huffing and puffing the printer kicked into action. It does a
lot of H & P but seems not to be consuming ink while doing so; it does so on
warm up, shut down and after ink cartridge changes. Once you open the front,
top flap, printing stops and then, a couple of seconds later, the cartridges
are brought out into the open. We were pleasantly surprised by the first
print out of the machine as we were only checking the printer was
functioning and took no notice of any settings. Buoyed up with initial
success, and after a delay to install a couple of new cartridges (this was a
loan machine that has been about a bit), we set about some proper testing.
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