The Canon i9900 Desktop Photo Printer: Sharp, Fast, Detailed, Quiet....More Adjectives In The Review!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Ten times faster, more detailed, and richer colored than any other wide-carriage printer.

Cons: The first time it takes in the paper will scare you!

The Bottom Line: 
The Canon i9900 allowed us to truly print photo-quality 8x10 and larger prints a reasonable price faster than any digital photo printer currently on the market.

Author's Review
I received a call from the technical brains of our two-men-and-a-camera extra photography business. We finished a wedding, and I wondered if he finished loading the 8x10s in the matted leathery album. He said all but one. One 35mm bridesmaid print was too close to the edges. The last lady on the side when the negative was printed was cut off due to the inevitable 2inchish loss when a 35mm negative is shoved into an 8x10 format. The lab printed it 8”x12”, but that doesn’t for the album pages. Excuses ran through my fertile mind. Instead of excuses, Tim, my photographer partner said, I took the plunge, and bought THE printer. Shocked, and wondering how much of our photography Slush-Fund he spent, I asked what he bought. He bought us the Canon i9900. I hung up the phone, and headed to his office. There it was, beautifully appointed in back and silver was the wide carriage, 13”x19” Escalade XLT of printers. Scattered around his desk were examples of its handiwork. Before we talk about what the prints looked like, I just have to run down the Michael Jordanesque technical statistics of the Canon i9900.

- Got Nozzles? – This puppy kicked out a wide path of color in minutes printing that 8x10. This was over a 200mb file on the highest quality output. It’s not the size of your nozzles, it’s the amount. There a two heads combining for a whopping 6,144 nozzles. On Epson’s best wide-carriage printer 2200, this image would have taken 20minutes. This took 90 seconds! The full 13x19 that would take the Epson 40 minutes took my Canon i9900 2 minutes, 53 seconds.

- It IS The Size Of Your Dots Though – The comparable Canon or Epson with the wide carriage is a 4 picoliter model. There are smaller picoliter models, but not in the wide carriage class. Folks, our Canon i9900 dots are 2, countem’, TWO picoliters in size. That translates to 11 million dots per square inch. Only Rembrandt packed more into an inch of two dimensional space. Not only did I see the Canon i9900 print side-by-side to the photo, but then, we printed the maximum 13x19 of a 120 size transparency file. We compared this to a laser lab's scan and print costing big bucks to our customer. The image structure, furniture detail, even the texture of the Berber carpet blew away the laser print. Now we can print, and keep the big bucks.

- The Shadow Knows – How do you deal with the digital printer Achilles Heal…shadow detail? With the Canon i9900. Whether rendering chestnut brown hair details in the wedding photos, or the knobs of a dresser in the dark corner of the bedroom I photographed, and print off the i9900 delivered the dots in the darkness of the print without coloring the section in. How did Canon pull out the shadow details? This baby is an 8 – color model. The cartridges called “tanks” in the “Canon Think Tanks System” have an extra red and green variation that produce…well more color variation. The beauty here too is that you only replace the color you need, and you can tell more ink is needed not only by using the standard gas-gauge-like Window's on your computer screen, but the actual tanks are transparent like the windows on an ant farm. Tim said Canon sells each color tank at $12.00/tank, but Buy.com sells the same Canon brand for $9.00/tank. Before you B&W photographers leave this Epinion, let me tell you this is one of the first I’ve seen that without any black or white ink tanks can print flawlessly shaded black and white or sepia toned prints. A fellow professional photographer brought his black-and-white landscape for printing, saw the quality side-by-side with a $20.00/print 8x10 off a laser photo printer, and later bought a i9900. It’s that good.

- Three Ports Of Call – Our i9900 comes with either the standard USB 1.1 port, or the high-speed 2.0 USB port, or the IEEE 1394 FireWire port. This isn’t only a PC thing though. MAC Daddies and Mommies can use these ports as well. I'll add that this printer can be hooked up to a digital movie camera that captures images.

The devilish magic of photography is in the details. Dots, dots, and more dots are arranged on paper, and our eyeballs and brain perceive these dots as detail that compile into images of Aunt Suzie at Six Flags with her eyes bugged out as she spirals to what she thinks is her certain death on a roller coaster. Printing from photonegatives yields such a saturation and gradation of dots per inch that are the standard digital prints must match. Every year, printers, printing paper, and ink improves to meet film standards. However, there are or were limitations to printers printing from digital files. The issue was that printers and paper were lagging behind digital images that are getting larger and larger with larger megapixel cameras. Printer technology used to lag behind digital photography file size as digital cameras and scanners compile files that can take the best printers half an hour or more to eek out printer cartridge draining photos that inspire lukewarm comments like, “That’s a digital print right? Looks pretty good.” You drop nearly a grand on a Nikon D70 and some side items, and kick out a print that took longer to print then a re-run of “Friends” to get a, “Looks nice?” No way. The equation that tried and failed to solve this megapixel problem was: higher larger image file size + more dots per square inch + higher resolution = longer print time. Canon solved this problems with increased print quality in less printing time.

In Tim’s office, I was dealing with a 207mb file. I waded through the drivers, loaded the paper, and fired mouse. Before I go further, can I talk about paper? How I wish I had some Canon Photo Paper Pro to compare. I had an equivalent 11ml. Epson glossy. Please compare print to print using glossy versus matte paper for ANY computer photo printing. I printed one in matte on both the Epson and the Canon i9900, and the Micro-Absorbtion-Splotching (MAS) (new techno-weenie term I recently invented) blurred. If you know of a matte computer photo printing paper without MAS, please let me and the others on Epinions know. Anyway, I fired the mouse. The Canon i9900 abruptly yanked in the paper so harshly I cussed. But once in the machine it printed so quietly I almost Control-Alt-Deleted in my pants. How is it so whispery? The heads travel in a wide path printing fully across in one path at maximum resolution so the i9900 rolls down to the next path instead of having to go over it again on that same path. Consequently, my 8x10 glided through so fast, I stood in amazement when it was finished thinking it was a printer tease, and it would abruptly suck it back into the machine. The only drawback is when done printing, it ejects the paper so fast if you didn’t extend the…the…all I can think to call it is the paper catcher arm it would shoot it into the floor as harshly as a Bulgarian power lifter drops his weights to the floor.

Now, for a few more cool features. The loading tray in the back can be sized from full sheet to 4x6 print. The 4x6 out of the Canon i9900 exceeds a photo quality and is more on par with the quality of a post card. But all the cooler was that the paper holder folds in two places, and finishes flat across the printer’s top acting as a dust cover. This increases the longevity of the printer, and prevents Aunt Suzie from knitting you a printer cover that looks like a pot holder. Also, Canon packs this printer up with “PictBridge” software. Most other digital cameras less than three years old that support a USB connection can hook up from the camera directly into the printer. I can scroll through the screen on the back of my camera and print directly from there. But like a “Ronco commercial”, “Wait, there’s more!” There is “Photostitch” software where panoramic photos can be printed out borderless (as all prints can be) and be left off where the next piece of computer paper comes in, and then each print can be joined into one wide photo.

It's important to reiterate, that Tim is the technical computer wiz of our dynamic photographic duo. However, Tim walked me through the screens and windows interfacing with our PCs. The set up was bunches of clear decisions that bored computer capable Tim to tears. I, on the other hand, found navigating through the i9900 screens reasonable with some help from Tim. Canon's customer support hasn't been put to the test on this puppy yet, and frankly I'd rather choke down all the pages of the manual before delving into the zombie-like world of technical support. Also, after putting the Canon i9900 through our paces, Tim and I want to sink some money into some Canon photo paper and a Canon 5000F or similar scanner. I’ve seen Canon paper prints from a Canon 9100 compared to Kodak photo paper and the step up on quality rendering with the more expensive Canon paper is wonderfully noticeable. However, Tim and I will be making less trips to the digital lab, and have more time to play on Photo Shop to capture more money in-house. At $425.00, the Canon i9900 took us to the next level of larger format digital photo printing.

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