There is no question that printing digital photos at home is a convenient choice. There is no need to register with an online service and there is no anticipation waiting for your digital photo prints to arrive which can sometimes take days or more. However photo printing at home does not come free of problems, one thing to consider is cost depending on how many digital photos you intend to print the cost of home printing can be pretty high. The cost does not end with the purchase price of the photo printer. Ongoing maintenance cost includes buying special photo printer and ink. Quality is another problem unless you are willing to spend a significant amount of money on a high end photo printer you will be using a simple printer that yields digital photo prints that are just ok.



The Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 is a new in a line of photo printers that have removed some of those disadvantages. For a reasonable and affordable price of $500 or less they deliver high quality digital photo prints and are flexible and easy to use. The Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 has the flexibility to produce photo prints at different sizes all the way up to 13 inches by 19 inches. Many other photo printers can only produce one print size the most common one being 4 inches by 6 inches.

Color tuning photo printers is a challenge and usually requires professional know-how. Professional photo printing services spend a lot of time and money fine tuning their printers to produce the correct color tones. The Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 utilizes an eight color ink system and a special color tuning software developed by Canon that reduces the efforts needed to handle color tuning. The Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 uses high resolution printing heads that utilize Canon FINE technology. The printer can output up to an amazing resolution of 4800 dpi by 2400 dpi.

Another ingredient in digital photo printing that adds cost and complexity is the printer paper. Many photo printers require the use of only one type of expensive photo paper. The Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 on the other hand is flexible and can practically use any paper that is fed to it. It can handle both thin and thick paper up to 1.2mm in thickness. It can use regular paper used to print documents but also high quality photo paper. It can use both matte and glossy paper. The choice of which paper to use depends on what you are printing and the required quality. If you need high quality photo prints you should feed the printer with photo paper otherwise regular plain paper can do just fine.

Another dilemma when printing both at home or at a photo printing service is which paper type to use matte or glossy? The answer depends on how the photo print is going to be used. As a general rule of thumb always use glossy photo paper for color prints and matte photo paper for black and white prints. If the photo prints will be touched a lot and by many people it is better to use matte as it makes fingerprints and other oily stains less noticeable.