nicole and i bought ourselves a "big-ass photo printer" for christmas. i spent some time looking for one that met our requiremnts.
- printer manufacturer must produce acid-free ink and photo paper for said printer. (nicole scrapbooks and this is important for "lasting memories" or something)
- printer must print b&w text on letter sized paper pretty quickly.
- printer must accept different ink tanks for each color (no "oh shit, this one's almost out of red, we should use it for swimming pool pics only").
- printer must do usb and firewire; usb 2.0 optional.
- printer must be produced by major name manufacturer (i once had a tektronix phazer something or other SCSI printer that i couldn't get drivers for without a $14K/year contract. i can only imagine trying to find a longhorn driver for 'billy joe jim bob's pretty good photo printer').
- printer paper and ink must be comperable in price to other major manufacturers' paper and ink. ($.29 to $.34/page)
the canon i9900 came close to meeting all of these. canon doesn't sell acid-free ink in all 8 colors required for photo printing, but 3rd parties do.
it's a big ass printer. i was immediately suprised by it's size when i opened the box. the picture above shows it printing an A3+ sized photo. A3+ is 13x19 inches and i must have visually scaled the image to match an 8.5x11 inch letter paper.
i'm impressed with the quality of the photo printing. it produced solid vibrant colors that are true to the image; my laptop screen isn't. the paper is realllly nice. i got some 9.6mil "pro" glossy 4x6 photo paper and it's easily the heaviest paper i've ever had any of my pictures on (including some pretty pricey 35mm kodachrome negative slide-to-print work i had done). i printed on the back of some 8x10 pro matte paper and it looked like shit; same image, same paper, other side? looked great.
i printed a couple calendars for celeste on 12x18 construction paper, mostly for the novelty of printing big. looked amazing.
i hate canon's driver packaging, but that's an infrequent pain. "Easy PhotoPrint" is an app that was bundled. it has rudimentary red eye/crop/resize type editting functions, but largely is useful for it's knowledge of the printer's geometry. the driver does include a really cool visualization of the amount of ink left in each tank.
overall i'm really happy. amazon has it for $409 with free shipping, right now.