Photo Speed/Timing (1.65) Photo printing almost always takes longer than document printing, even 4-by-6-inch prints, largely because the print head is covering the entire sheet of paper with ink, as opposed to approximately five percent when printing a document. Our test times are usually longer than the manufacturers’ reported speeds because we print on the highest quality settings.   Just as the Pro9500 was the slowest document printer of the three pro-photo printers, it was also the slowest at printing photos, taking 4 minutes to print a 4-by-6-inch photo. This compares with just 30 seconds on the Pro9000 and just over 2.5 minutes on the R2400. Letter-sized (8.5-by-11-inch) images printed on the Pro9500 at twice the rate of the smaller prints, over 8 minutes. A3+-sized (13-by-19-inch) prints doubled the time again, to over 16 minutes each. The Pro9000 quintupled its own 4-by-6-inch print time when printing letter-sized images, but this still clocked in at just under 2.5 minutes. The R2400 doubled its 4-by-6-inch print time to just over 5.5 minutes.   Photo Print Speeds in Pages per Minute   4x6 8.5 x 11 13 x 19   sml lge sml lge sml lge Canon Pixma Pro9000 2.00 2.00 0.40 0.41 0.18 0.24 Epson Stylus Photo R2400 0.38 0.38 0.19 0.19 0.09 0.04 Canon Pixma Pro9500 0.25 0.25 0.12 0.12 0.06 0.06   Color Accuracy (5.89) The Pro9500 scored very well on our color accuracy test. This test is conducted using a digital version of Gretag Macbeth’s Colorchecker chart, created for our test labs by Bror Hultgren of Image Integration, Inc.. This 24-square chart is composed of colors that are commonly seen in photographs, including blue sky, foliage, dark and light skin colors, reds, oranges, cyan, yellow, and magenta. The chart also contains a gray scale, with 6 tones from white to black. A representation of this chart appears below.       Each of these squares was created using La*b* values, which are basically a coordinate system to locate the color in an imaginary color space. L corresponds to the lightness or saturation of the color, while the a* value locates the color along the x axis (from cyan to magenta) and b* locates it along the y axis (cyan to green).   After the chart was printed on the Pro9500, we measured the color values for each of the 24 squares using the EyeOne Pro spectrophotometer. We then calculated the difference between these values and the ideal values from the original chart. The average value, know as the Delta E mean color error, is what our score is based upon.   We tested the Pro9500 using Canon’s stock profile for their Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss paper, resulting in a mean error of 3.65. This was a very good score—the lowest error achieved by any printer except the Epson Stylus Photo R2400. This printer achieved a lower mean error of 1.42 using a profile for the company’s premium Photo Paper Glossy downloaded from Epson’s website.   The Pro9500 reproduced skin tones very closely to ideal values. Dark grays and black had exceptionally low error values, which bodes well for good neutral black-and-white prints. The highest errors, which were still low compared to some other printers, were in the blue range of the spectrum.   It’s worth noting that we also tested the custom profile that we created for this printer using Gretag Macbeth’s EyeOne Match software and their EyeOne Pro spectrophotometer, and the Pro9500 achieved an even lower mean color error, 1.79. However, we base our score on the printer manufacturer’s own profiles provided for the printer.   Color Gamut (6.69) The Pro9500 displayed a very wide color gamut, which is the range of colors that a printer can reproduce. It scored the highest of all printers we’ve tested, just slightly ahead of the Epson Stylus Photo R2400.   We measure a printer’s color gamut by viewing the ICC profile within Gamutvision, a software program designed for viewing profiles. We compare the gamut of a printer with the gamut of the Adobe RGB color space, which is the common color space that many professional photographers and designers work within. No printer will be able to achieve the ideal color gamut of the Adobe space, which encompasses 1, 225,088 colors. Many printers we’ve tested have scored in the 40th to 50th percentiles, with some scoring even lower.   The Canon Pro9500 was able to reproduce 62 percent of the Adobe RGB space, for a total of 755,583 colors. The Epson R2400 achieved 60 percent, or 740,825 colors. The chart below illustrates the profile as a three-dimensional color space nested within the Adobe RGB space. Noticeable is a limited range in the green and yellow part of the spectrum.       Dmax (7.53) Dmax is a measure of the density of the blackest black that a printer can produce. The ideal value for a printer is 2.50, and most high-end printers will be able to print a black around 2.30.   The Pro9500 scored very well, achieving a dmax of 2.36, the third highest dmax value we’ve seen so far. This value was achieved using Canon’s Photo Paper Plus, semi-gloss surface. The Pro9500 scored higher in this category than the Epson Stylus Photo R2400, which only achieved a dmax value of 2.26. The Pro9500’s dye-ink equivalent by Canon, the Pro9000, scored just below the Epson, at 2.25.   A high dmax value bodes well for a printer’s black-and-white printing performance. A value of 2.36 indicates that the Pro9500 can produce a very deep black in shadows and other dark tones. It is not necessarily an indication of the entire tonal range that a printer can produce. We cover that in the next test.   Monochrome (6.50) Indeed, the Pro9500 produced very rich blacks in our test print. The shadows were definitely darker than those in the same print from the Epson Stylus Photo R2400, both on the Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss and the Fine Art Museum Etching paper provided by Canon. However, the tonal range was not as rich as the Epson. The print from the Canon Pro9500 showed more contrast (richer blacks, whiter whites), but it lacked the exceptionally subtle shades of gray produced by the R2400. This was not entirely surprising, since Epson dedicates three inks—black, light black, and light light black—solely for the printing of black-and-white images. This accounts for a very smooth gradation between gray tones.   That said, the Pro9500 produces very nice black-and-white prints. We detected a slightly warm cast to the prints, especially when placed against the more neutral Epson prints, both from the R2400 and the amazing little PictureMate printers.

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