Canon PIXMA MP990 Network ready Ultimate All-In-One Photo Printer

This machine was purchased to replace a fully functioning, but rarely used Epson 870 photo printer and more importantly, an HP3100 all in one printer.

The separate inks mean we're only buying to replace what we need; We've done maybe 40? A4 prints on Ilford gloss paper and have just needed to replace the grey cartridge. The black shows almost zero useage - which is what I would expect to see.

Setting up on WiFi was very easy.

Print quality on draft documents is fine and, double sided printing is easy to set.

Photo images taken on anything from an iPhone (3mp) to a Canon G9 (12mp) are coming out really well. Note: We've now discovered how much of a difference good quality paper makes to the finished output.

Scanning 35mm slides/negatives is reasonably straightforward and results are O.K. This is the first time I've tried a film scanner, so I'm still gettting to grips with it. Suffice to say it can do a very reasonable job and I've even put 120 and 126 slides in to be scanned ( not with the carrier ) and this turned out good as well.

Very pleased with this Printer so far! 5 Stars.

This multifunction printer is, so far, meeting all my expectations. Solid construction, good documentation & set up a breeze. Quite large & heavy - this reflects the specification & build quality.

I wanted: a home use multifunction printer/scanner/copier with proper photo capability and without the essentially useless excess real estate of a fax. This model has no fax but has the added benefit of a slide/negative scanner.

Had it for a few weeks now & all working exactly as it should on Ethernet - not tried USB. True I've bottled & haven't tried to set up the wireless capability, so can't comment on that.

There's no document feeder but that's no big deal for a photoprinter - there is built in duplex printing which while not exactly speedy, is fine for paper-saving.
Don't be put off if, when you get it out of the box there seems to be no negative carrier - it's under the copier lid, behind the platen pressure pad.

The film scanner is a proper one with a lamp in the copier lid for transmitted light scanning, but only 6 negatives or 4 mounted slides at a time - still OK for home use but too slow for the professional. Good quality scans if you crank it up to 2400 dpi, but of course slow at that resolution.

The Canon OCR software isn't up to that much but the rest seems to work pretty well, installed on Win 7 and XP.

Six separate ink tanks (although two are black & one is grey, used only for monochrome prints as far as I can tell). This actually is sensible as the large black tank keeps the ordinary text printing side supplied while the photo inks are not used up. All the supplied tanks are full size as well, so you don't have to search & buy spares straight away.

Haven't actually done much photoprinting yet, but with Canon paper, the quality so far is excellent.

Excellent delivery by Amazon as well, and as ever. The Citylink driver turned up at 5.30pm the day before it was due, and this was with SuperSaver delivery. Can't fault it.

Update September 2010: Having now used the printer for a bit longer I, like a number of other users, have found that it is rather heavy on ink consumption. I'm sure this is related to the frequent print-head cleaning cycles needed to keep the quality up. To avoid ink wastage, the usage strategy I have adopted is to save up your photo printing, scanning and copy jobs & do them all in one go if you can. The rest of the time, keep the printer turned off & don't be tempted to use it for the occasional quick B & W photocopy - you will just haemorrhage ink of all colours to the waste tank every time it is turned on.

I have also now had a chance to set up the WiFi comms - simple, works well, no problems provided you know your network password.

I also recommend printing from a memory card inserted into the printer. This seems to give better results than direct from application software. Of course, this may just be related to my OS and driver set up.

Truely superb printer,just replaced my trusty old S9000 with this and am very pleased,easy to setup,works fine with Windows 7 64bit,also works seamlessly with CS4,only thing i havent tried yet is the slide/neg scanner feature but so far so good,inks are rather small but much cheaper than for my S9000.A highly recommended printer,Well done Canon yet again.