Canon PIXMA MP990 Wireless Inkjet Photo AllInOne Printer

a fair review
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I have professional scanner and printer but did not need all the equipment i had so i decided to get this one not before reading everything i could and checking personally this baby. i was so surprised it is by far the best all-in-one there. the quality of scanned pics and the copies you get from this one. you will save all your pics and get rid of the originals.my negatives have more than 20 years and still i was able to get the pics look better than the positive original ones. dont be fooled, get this all-in-one, follow instructions step-by-step and you will be using it in about 20 minutes, and once you start using it you wont stop till all the pics are digitalized. no noise, no waste of ink or paper, just the perfect equipment for a semi-pro. you can use this as copier, printer and scanner, it is y far way better than fax machine. Instead of faxing a document just scan it and email it. i give you my word, you will love not just this all-in-one but your pictures. you will look at then in a different way.i hope you have great time using it, as i do using mine.

PIXMA 990
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Haven’t used enough to give rating on economy but I like most everything about the unit. Just a little slow to start up.

a little slow
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
everything works fine setup was easy enough but my mom or wife would not be able to set up (not the most computer savy)

copying was pretty slow alot of time for printer to get ready to print then a hesitation (5 seconds) in the middle of each page

Photos were good as I expected and I expect alot from Canon. Wireless works without a hitch although a little time was invested

getting everything talking to each other. Ink tanks already look like they’ll run out fast, but I’m used to that. The price you pay

for conveniance and ability to touch up and create special photos. Overall what I expected.

love it
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
just got this after owning previous 4 year old model pixma all in one. the setup was a breeze for both our MACs and PCs. great print quality and love the full wireless connectivity for scanning and printing. prints quiet and fast enough.

highly recommended.

First review of Canon PIXMA MP990
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This is my first review of the Canon PIXMA MP990. On first look you kind of get the feeling your looking at a small tank and it feels like it when you lift it up. The setup was easy thought at first it was a little daunting to see all those ink cartridges and a print head to put in. The print head went right in and was easy, just slid in and secure with a lever. It took a few minuets to make sure each ink cartridge was in the correct slot and seated correctly so the light on the end came on. The one place things could go wrong here is a piece of plastic that twist that covers the ink port on the cartridge that might break in the wrong way if you don’t follow directions. The one Doh!! moment I had was when I turned it on it kept indicating a door was open and I just couldn’t see it at first. There’s a very small door inside the print just under the printer platen that must have pulled down when I was taking all the tape used to secure the printer. So then it was all set up and I turned it on. It whirred away for awhile priming the print head and going through multiple diagnostics till it was ready. It had some special paper just for the setup that almost felt like thin cardboard that it used for the test print, they have some special instructions for it in the documentation.

I’ve got mine set up so my XP machine is connected with a USB connection and I have a WiFi connection to my Vista Laptop down stairs. I don’t have my router password protected (shame on me!!!) so it wasn’t much of a test setting it up to connect the laptop to it. You do have some special software you need to load on the remote machines so it can see the printer and also scan to it but that wasn’t any issue setting up.

So far I haven’t really done much printing on this machine put I have noticed that only after printing a manual of around 60 pages, one 8 by 11 B/W photo, and a couple of smaller 4 by 5′s that the colored ink is already down by a quarter so I’m guessing it uses up ink fairly fast, time will tell. The black ink so far is showing no usage. So I can’t say much about usage but the color of the photos is very good using both the Canon paper and some cheaper photo paper I have.

For the scanner so far I am very impressed. Looking at the build quality through the glass you can see that the scan head runs on two steel rods while most other multi printers I’ve taken apart just run on a plastic track built into the floor of the scanner. I do highly recommend that you use the Mp Navigator EX that comes with the software. I’m not sure if it was just the old Paint Shop Pro 8 software I was using or you can only see the higher scan settings in the EX software but I could only see 1200dpi in the Paint Shop software and I can see 4800dpi using the EX software. For color photos it looks like 600dpi is as high as I can get while with slides and negatives you can go up to the 4800dpi. So I guess if you want to do 1200dpi for photos you would have to use a separate software. It does though recognize the edges of the photos and will scan them separately. Using the special setup for the slides was a little puzzling even with a diagram as it took me awhile to realize I just had to take the film holder out and lay the rest of the holder back on the platen matching up the hole with the pin on the side of the platen. There is a separate lighted platen under the large while backing that comes off that lights up when you tell it you are using negatives or slides. I was amazed at the scan at 1200dpi how well one of the larger 35 millimeter slides came out. I printer it and it looked like a regular photo. I even took a magnifying glass to it and could hardly see any pixelation.

Well that’s about all I can think of right now, I’ll try and keep this updated as I use things or any issues come up.

PIXMA MP990
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Today I received my new Canon PIXMA MP990 Inkjet Photo All-In-One Printer from Amazon. There is only one word to describe this printer: Wow!

After unpacking the printer, installing the drivers and software from the included CD-ROM, I updated the drivers and software for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from Canon’s website. The Wi-Fi setup took about one minute and it has been working flawlessly all day.

Then I scanned a few documents and printed them out – the quality is just amazing.

There are six ink cartridges in total (in their installed order):

*Magenta (221)

*Black (221)

*Grey (221)

*Pigment Black (220)

*Cyan (221)

*Yellow (221)

There is a pigment-based black ink cartridge (220) that is only used for printing text. The rest of the dye-based ink cartridges (221) are used for printing photos. The text output is as clear or better than a laser printer, and the photo output is absolutely stunning IMHO.

If you are looking for a new printer for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard get the new Canon PIXMA MP990 printer. You won’t be disappointed…

YAHOO!!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I love this printer/scanner. Easy set up. Just turn it on and it tells where to go from there. I would buy it again.

Canon MPl990 Multi Function Printer
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
The Canon MP990 printer has been an excellent buy. It has met and exceeded all my expectations. Easy setup, and easy to use. I would recommend it to anyone. The only drawback is the lack of ability to buy the gray ink at a local store, ie, Staples, Office Depot etc. If one does buy the printer, I would recommend buying a couple of gray inks on line to have on hand.

Awesome!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I’ve printed 80 invitations with a grayscale pic on the outside and color inside – perfect! I’ve also printed 300+ notecards – again, perfect. Love this printer! Wireless setup was a breeze with Vista (nothing else is a breeze with Vista!) I’ve printed a few color photos, with better-than-average results. I am sooo happy I purchased this Pixma 990 printer!

MP990 w/ Mac G4 on OS 10.4
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I am running an old G4 as well as an aluminum Powerbook, both on Mac OS 10.4.11. I have owned the MP990 for about a month and I thought it was time to start my review. I will follow up as I explore the different features. I spent more than 14 months researching printers, scanners and all-in-ones before I bought this unit. I will try to explain my rationale so that this review can be of help to someone who likes to know everything about a product that they can before they buy like me. I had a bad experience with my last Epson RX600 which just up and died on me one day. The Epson always seemed to get clogged again and again unless I used it very regularly. I have a laser printer that I print most of my text docs to so the Epson was too finicky for me. I was dissuaded from Canon printers and AIOs after reading many of the previous complaints about older models, the bad chip issue with the first generation ink cartridges, the dreaded U150 error that so many of their models displayed. The fact that Canon printers require you to replace an empty ink cartridge before you can use the scanner is in my opinion a major strategic flaw in their marketing plan.

I have printed about 60 4×6 prints and 4 8×10 photo prints so far with this printer as well as a few text pages using the starter cartridges. My grey ink cartridge has just displayed the “!” warning that it is getting low. The other cartridges are soon to follow except the Pigment black cart which is quite a bit larger and is used more for text printing I believe. This confirms others’ statements that you should stock up on grey ink carts as they are the most difficult to find and you go through them fastest. Amazon usually has them in stock. When my grey cart goes empty I will confirm whether or not the scanner and copy functions are operable or not and report back.

Installation and setup of the drivers on my Macs was uneventful and printer setup was simple, you just have to think about it a minute and proceed slowly following the directions; I downloaded the latest drivers and application installer from the Canon website and got the unit operating on Ethernet in short order; I connected it to the Ethernet hub I have connected to my Airport Extreme and so far have confirmed connectivity from my wireless laptop via this method, I have yet to run it through it’s paces though and conduct relative speed tests between Airport and built-in wireless. I did not setup the built in wireless in the printer so I can’t vouch for it’s function yet. I did confirm that so far I have not been able to make the scanner function work via Ethernet connection using the Photoshop ‘Import’ plugin nor from the Canon “Solutions Menu” software utility, but after I connected a USB cable then I was able to use the USB plugin and got some nice reflective scans. Still exploring the available Canon color profiles to find an optimal profile for converting RGB scans to CMYK. The Canon 8800f scanner was my alternate choice if I was to go with a separate scanner and printer option. I felt good knowing that the same scanner element is used in this highly rated scanner as they use in the MP990. I would tend to trust Canon’s optics over Epson’s in any case. I am very glad though that I did not go with the separate component option and get the HP Photosmart 7560 along with the Canon 8800f. I saved myself some serious deskspace as well as money and I am not disappointed with the quality overall of this device at this point.

Plain and simple, this printer provides stunning photographic images, especially if you use Canon Photo Pro II paper, the best of them as per my research. The Canon has a 1 picoliter droplet size, smaller than the comparable Epson Artisan 1.2Pl droplet. I can’t imagine getting better photos from another printer at this price; they are lab quality and as good or better than what you would get at any of the drop-off places. Copying works nicely via the nifty front panel display which is colorful and easy to read but the printer can take a bit long to prepare to copy or print before it actually does it. Definitely not ‘instant on’.

My only issues so far with this Canon technology is the Easy-PhotoprintEX software that is installed. The good part is that the interface allows you to choose and select multiple images from multiple folders on your hard drive and batch them into one big “saveable” print batch job. The bad part is that depending upon the processing options you select (smoothing, noise reduction, ‘Vivid Color’ enhancement, layout et al) the software has to process and create a single print file for all of your selections in the batch before it will even start printing any photos. This may take a while because the software is PITIFULLY slow. Canon’s software developers may be better at building software drivers and interfaces for Windows but the Mac suite is well-intentioned but frustrating to deal with. Better to make your batches smaller. Easy-PhotoprintEX does appear to automatically select the appropriate color profile for the selected paper and results from Adobe RGB 1998 files are very good. I will be playing more with printing directly from Photoshop as both RGB and converted CMYK.

To sum, so far I really like this printer/scanner even with the software issues and occasional inexplicable machine delay. If anything goes awry and/or I discover anything really cool about this MP990 I will let y’all know.

12/22/09: Confirmed that I can print from my laptop wirelessly to the MP 990 using the ethernet driver via Airport Extreme connection rather than by the printer’s built-in wireless. Print speed is quite acceptable.

Sweet machine! Makes my old MP730 look like a dinosaur!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I read these reviews and comments yesterday before I bought the MP990 last night. I replaced a Canon MP730 and a Canon i900D with the MP990. I never used the fax function on the MP730 nor did I ever use the sheet feeder. I had a couple of issues to figure out, but stepping back and thinking for a minute helped resolve the issues. Considering that I was doing this during happy hour, I did pretty well. I tried to figure out how to install the print head but hadn’t lifted the platen to reveal the guts of the machine. Once I realized that the diagram in the instructions didn’t match what I was looking at, it was a simple issue to lift the glass and the print head mount slid right into view. I also hadn’t powered on the machine yet. It’s amazing what actually following the directions can do for you! The print head mounted easily, and it was way cool to see the red lights blaze with each ink tank installed! It also took me a few minutes to figure out where the front cassette was! I tried (ever so gently) to pull out pieces that weren’t meant to come out until I realized the cassette was beneath the paper output tray.

I did not require any cable to download anything or configure the printer for Wi-Fi. The printer found all wireless networks in reach. I had actually had the network name incorrect, but the printer found the one I use. With finding the WEP key, the connection couldn’t have been easier and I learned a few things about wireless networks in the process.

I downloaded and installed the drivers and software updates from the Canon website for Windows 7 and all works well so far.

As far as I’m concerned, this was a very good buy, but time will tell. I’d give this printer 5 stars.

I LOVE IT!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I have only had the printer a few days so my experience with it is limited, but I have to say that so far I am very impressed. The footprint is a little large, but it has weight and feels like quality construction. I was a little intimidated when I started the set-up, but the instructions walk you through it step-by-step and I had no problems. I mostly dreaded trying to set up the wireless networking; they offer you more than one set-up option, but I followed the directions for copying the network settings from Windows Vista onto a USB drive and it worked like a charm! The printing is fast and quiet and I love the automatic duplex printing.