Inkjet photo printers are usually cheap to buy, if expensive to run, so the £549 price tag on Canon's i9950 seems a bit steep. But this is no ordinary photo printer. Its wide carriage, large-gamut inking system, ultra-high resolution and special digital camera support put the i9950 into a different class altogether.

The unit looks like a conventional Canon inkjet in design - a lean-back input tray on top and an extending output tray at the front - but is built much bigger in order to handle large cut-sheet media. The i9950 can print to a maximum sheet size of A3+ (13 x 19 inches) at full bleed: that is, to all four edges of the paper without leaving a white border. Borderless printing is a must-have feature for serious photographers because it side-steps the fuss of manually guillotining the results and avoids the amateurish finish of micro-perforated tear-away edges.

Looking under the carriage hood reveals Canon's new ChromaPLUS photo inking system which employs no fewer than eight ink colours: cyan, magenta, yellow, black, light cyan, light magenta, red and green. Each colour is installed as an individual ink cartridge sitting side-by-side on top of the print-head.

Get the latest Dell Coupons and other computer coupons at CheapStingyBargains.com.

Working with so many colours is not just a gimmick. The light cyan and light magenta, as found in many photo printers, help reproduce pale colours with less dottiness, while the additional red and green expand the colour gamut of the printouts considerably beyond standard CMYK.

Canon likes to quote impressive numbers in its specifications. Print resolution, for example, is rated at 2400 x 4800dpi, while the ink droplets are said to be a mere 2 picolitres in volume (half the size of droplets in most other photo inkjets). But even if you treat the number game in product marketing with healthy cynicism, there's no denying that the i9950 produces very high quality output. Print speed is quite good too: most A3 photos turn out in around four minutes, although one of our test examples dropped into the output tray after just two.

Canon's finishing touches include a front-loading CD media feeder, allowing you to print directly onto the label side of CDs and DVDs along a flat path. Digital photographers will also appreciate the convenient camera input port situated at the front of the unit. Just plug in your camera, select your shots and paper size, then print - no computer required. Inevitably there is a limitation here in that the port only works with PictBridge-supporting cameras. Sony, Olympus and Nikon support this technology as well as Canon, but not in all their camera models. If you own HP or Epson cameras, the port is useless to you.

Rather than a general-purpose inkjet for the office, the i9950 is specifically a digital photographer's printer which produces A3+ output and offers additional features for those who own Canon cameras. Helpfully, the price is within reach of dedicated amateur snappers, not just professionals.