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Canon’s PIXMA MP990 is the  dearest  all-in-one in the company’s range and has all the bells and whistles of the others, plus some . It’s designed for home use and aimed also at photo enthusiasts, particularly those interested in black and white photography.

This is a big, silver and black machine,  It has two paper trays both capable of holding 150 sheets, you can alos print cd’s and dvd’s using a separate disc holder  . 

 The printer has a large 93mm lcd display to scroll through the menus, and large buttons for other functions  .

The scanner is a standard A4, glass flatbed with no Automatic Document Feeder . Inside the scanner lid, though, is a removable panel which  hides  a transparency and negative holder, which can be laid on the flatbed for high-resolution scanning of photographic media.

 There are three slots for different sorts of memory cards including CompactFlash, SD, XD and memory cards. A PictBridge socket is also provided  .

At the back of the machine are sockets for USB and Ethernet, but the PIXMA MP990 also offers wireless networking. Wi-Fi setup is  quite simple  .

The PIXMA MP990 uses a six-ink print engine , but rather than adding light cyan and light magenta, it adds photo black and grey inks to the standard CMYK set. All six ink cartridges click into the print head and each cartridge has its own red LED indicator to show it’s properly seated and to flash when the ink is low.

Canon  state  the PIXMA MP990 can print 11.9 ISO black page images a minute and 9.1 colour page ones.  Although we did not see these speeds, we did   though we got closer to them than is often the case. Our 5-page text print returned 6.98ppm , which  climbed  to 9.30ppm for the 20-page test. 

These speeds are  quite reasonable  for an inkjet.  Though there’s a fair degree of variation because of the amount of fiddling about the printer does before and during printing. On one photo print the machine took 45s before it started printing. On the second run, this preparation time was much shorter, and we saw these kinds of differences on some of the other print tests, too .

 This printer like to print photos, and it does it quickly. Our 15 x 10cm print took just 30 seconds  .

Print quality is generally good. Black text is  , well black actuallyt generally well formed, with only occasional ink bleed from the pigmented ink. Colour graphics are bright and smooth, with no signs of banding and very little obvious patterning from colour dithers . 

Canon printers generally print photographs well, and this machine is no exception. Photo images remain among the best we’ve seen from five or six-ink machines.  Transitions between colours  are smooth, tones are natural and there’s plenty of detail in darker as well as lighter areas of  pictures  . 

There’s an extra grey cartridge to add to the other Canon ink cartridges, and  factor into the colour running costs for this machine which pushes up the colour cost per page. We calculate a black page cost of 3.18p and a colour page cost of 9.27p, both including 0.7p for paper. As this printer is likely to be used by photo enthusiasts, we recommend you stick with genuine Canon ink, rather than going down the compatible road.

Verdict

As  Canon’s top of the range all in one  , the PIXMA MP990 includes wireless connection, CD/DVD print, transparency and negative scanning and an extra grey ink for improved black and white prints. Print quality is excellent and speeds, though a little erratic, are in the same order as its main rivals. For the given feature set, the price is not unduly high and overall it deserves a recommendation .