Canon Bubble Jet i990

Canon's latest offering in the colour inkjet market aims to satisfy those with an eye for quality as well as a need for speed. There's nothing particularly astounding about the design of the Bubble Jet i990, although it will take up a fair bit of space on your desk. The main advances, however, are housed within the case.

With a print head containing a grand total of 5,376 nozzles, Canon is currently leading the field in terms of print head size. The advantage of this is that the Bubble Jet i990 can speed up the printing process by firing out more droplets of ink on to the page in one go.

Canon has also made this printer a seven-ink model. These consist of the standard black, cyan, magenta and yellow inks found on most normal inkjets, along with a light magenta and light cyan cartridge, which allow for more realistic skin tones. The seventh ink is a new red ink and, according to Canon, increases the range of colours between yellow and red by 60 per cent.

Indeed, our test prints were extremely impressive, and you'd do well to distinguish the colour prints from those from a professional photo lab. What's more, Canon wasn't exaggerating when it said this printer was fast. It took less than a minute to print a full A4 colour photo at its highest quality setting. Black text printing was a little slower than we anticipated, though - an average of 20 seconds per page.

Despite being a inkjet printer for the photo-enthusiast, the Bubble Jet i990 is incredibly easy to set up. It took us less than 10 minutes to take it out of the box and run off the first set of prints. What's more, it comes complete with a variety of software utilities to help you get the most out of your photo-printing.

Although it's an impressive printer, the fact remains that if you're only going to be printing out the occasional colour photo and don't mind them not being absolutely perfect, you can pick up far cheaper models.

However, if it's quality and speed you're after, the Bubble Jet i990 from Canon certainly won't disappoint.

Contact: Canon 08705 143723
www.canon.co.uk