Canon Pixma Pro 9000 Mark II

The new Pixma Pro 9000 Mark II is not too dissimilar in appearance to its predecessor the Pixma Pro 9000.

Both are 'professional' A3 colour inkjet printers designed to help photographers get the best out of their images. At £500 it's vastly more expensive than most of the printers we look at, but then it's almost impossible to find an A3 photo printer for the home that costs substantially less.

Despite the upfront price of the device, it could pay for itself if you want to make a lot of large prints or if you are a hobbyist who wants to make a business from photography. While fewer and fewer people may be getting conventional small prints made, there is more demand now for larger prints as they become available, but an A3 can cost £5 or so online.

The large prints are not the Pixma Pro 9000 Mark II's only important feature. It uses eight ink tanks where a standard inkjet printer might only use two or three, so it's capable of more colourful and detailed prints (in terms of colour usage, at least) than most smaller printers.

It was easy to set up using the supplied Canon software, and it comes with Adobe Photoshop Elements, which was rather an odd choice - most people buying such a printer will already have their own photo software, so a more professional program such as a version of Photoshop itself would have been more appropriate.

It connects to the computer using USB and the power supply is contained within the printer's body so there is no external 'brick'. That body is large, but only a little larger than the width of an A3 sheet, so if you have a large desk it's not going to take up too much room.