A4 ink-jet printers are commodity items and are priced as such, but as soon as you want to print larger than A4, you're into specialist equipment that can cost a lot of money. Large format printers can easily break the £1,000 barrier, but Canon has split the difference with the A3+ i9950. A3+ is big enough to print right to the edges of a sheet of paper twice the size of A4. With the i9950, you can print that size in full eight-colour photo quality.

The printer is wide and has a semi-circular profile. Paper feeds from a paper hopper with a support which unfolds in three stages from the back of the machine, to a telescopic tray at the front. It can take paper from standard 15 x 10cm photo blanks, up to A3+, and a lever at the front moves the paper-out tray, so you can slide in a CD carrier for direct printing of CD blanks.

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Lift the lid and you can get at the permanent print head and its eight plug-in ink cartridges. As well as the basic cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink tanks, Canon adds photo cyan, photo magenta, red and green. The inclusion of red and green inks expands the colour gamut, and should help particularly in printing portraits and landscapes.

Unusually, there are two sockets at the rear for connecting the printer to a computer. As well as the standard USB 2 socket, there's also a FireWire port. Unfortunately, only Mac users can take advantage of FireWire, as only USB 2 drivers are provided for Windows users.

What is also provided, though, is a PictBridge port, so you can directly connect a digital camera and print from it, without having to interface with a PC.

Print quality from the i9950 is very good, certainly up to the standard of Canon's well-known Pixma range of A4 machines. The extra colours really do make a noticeable difference to the intensity of flesh tints on the one hand and grass and trees in outdoor shots on the other.

Running costs depend largely on the prices you can find for the ink cartridges and the specialist papers you will probably be printing on. A3 photo paper, suitable for posters and large format portraits, isn't cheap, but this printer is certainly capable of semi-professional results, so there's no reason why you shouldn't subsidise your running costs from sales of your prints.

This is an excellent medium-format printer, which offers the facility to break out of the A4 straitjacket without having to take out a second mortgage. If you need to be able to print high-quality photos in a wide range of sizes, the i9950 fits the bill.