Pixma Pro9000 Mk.II - Worth buying used?

[da na]

Recently I found two discarded Pixma Pro9000 Mk.II printers, and took them home to refurbish. With one working unit fully repaired, I can say with full confidence that this may be the best printer ever made. It feels too nice for me to own, despite being a solid 15 years old.

These sell for acceptable to highway robbery prices on eBay, I'd say a fair price for one is up to ~$150 or so depending on its condition. If you want incredibly gorgeous prints, I would absolutely recommend picking one up.

 

Quick TL/DR.

PROS: Built sturdily, gorgeous prints.

CONS: Needs photo paper, guzzles ink, 8 cartridges. 

 

The Pro9000 printer, although not giant, is still quite a girthy unit. It weighs 35 pounds and takes up a considerable amount of space. The paper tray on top, rear, and front can accept up to A3+ (17" width) paper, and interestingly, the paper path is completely reversible. You can feed blank paper into the top, back, or front, and have the printed image come out the front or back. I appreciate this versatility; not having to turn the printer around to load a comically large sheet of paper into a specific tray is a godsend when working with large media. 

The Pro9000 Mk.II is an inkjet, which might immediately leave a bad taste in your mouth due to the abundance of horrible consumer-grade inkjet units. However, inkjet when done well is spectacular - as the Canon proves. The Pixma settles not for the typical cyan, magenta, yellow, and black cartridges, instead doubling the cartridge count to eight. The added cartridges include photocyan and photomagenta, lighter versions of magenta and cyan, and red and green, which are... red and green. 

By far the best part of this printer, though, is the fact Canon knows what an empty cartridge should look like. This Pixma printer will drain your cartridges until they are completely dry - and then, when a cartridge completely runs out, it'll give you an option to keep printing without replacing it. That's right - you can acknowledge that a cartridge is bone dry and continue printing with the last dregs of that color. You can literally load the printhead with eight completely empty cartridges and it will STILL let you try and print. This is how ink-based printers should all be. 

I originally scoffed at the idea of buying genuine Canon photo paper for this printer, until my first few prints on copier paper came out wet and dark. The amount of ink used on the High print quality is so much that, if using "normal" paper, the print comes out so damp that the paper curls up and folds in on itself within a few hours, not to mention the colors looking horrible. Thick paper is absolutely necessary for the ink to have enough depth to soak in and show its true vivid colors. 

For the following tests, I used Canon Photo Paper Plus Matte, the High Quality/Borderless setting, waited 6 hrs for prints to dry before scanning.

The scanned images look flatter and duller than the prints do in person, due to compression and also me having a crappy scanner.

 

The first few photos I printed are of my late best friend.

These are absolutely the best prints I've seen - in terms of DPI, I cannot distinguish the photo from the original image - no pixelation. In terms of color, I can nitpick a bit - colors in the grass at the bottom are a little bit dull, especially near the light brown grass. On the left, middle to top, the lake's color looks a little muddy, and the grass hill on the right looks a little over-bright. However, I do think the image overall looks gorgeous. 

I printed all of these test photos borderless, which is another thing one can only do on expensive photo paper. I tried with regular copier paper and the edges got smeared and wrinkly - on the other hand, though, borderless prints on photo paper look stunning. 

The next image also came out wonderfully - or at least it looks lovely to the human eye. This scan is how I figured out I needed to clean my scanner's glass - ignore the streaks please, they are not on the printed image. The color and contrast in this photo are wonderful, however, some of the grass has odd blue dots on it. Not a big fan of that, but I'd assume color profiling and precise tweaking could solve this.

You may be able to see some slight blotchiness in the dark black areas on both the scanned image and the photo. Even after 6 hours of drying, these didn't fully soak in; I've noticed sometimes it takes 24 hours for these to fully disappear. 

Final dog photo, this one seems to have come out a little purple. Again, likely a color profiling issue and I presume enabling one or more of the photo optimization options in the driver would solve this. The pine straw on the ground should not be quite that saturated in magenta. 

This is easily the best image I have printed, though. The shades on his fur and the fine details of the green plant are really brought out. I am absolutely blown away by what the Pixma can do. 

Final conclusion: It looks absolutely wonderful. For about 6 hours of work to get it up and running perfectly (including setting up the print server), I cannot complain one bit at all. I have never seen color and contrast pop like this on paper, free of smears, streaks, and artifacts. 

The huge downside is ink prices. This beast guzzles ink - and Canon's official cartridges are $18-20 per unit, meaning it'd cost $160 to fully replenish your Pixma Pro9000 Mk.II. As my set of OEM cartridges were about to run out, I purchased a box of 32 aftermarket replacements - 4 of each color - for $34 on Amazon. I printed a couple last images on the Canon set before they were totally cooked, printed the same images on the aftermarket cartridges, and they are literally indistinguishable, both to my eye and the flatbed scanner's. vErIfIeD gEnUiNe consumables are stupidly expensive, and while paying the extra little bit for photo paper is absolutely worth every cent, the same absolutely cannot be said for the cartridges.