With Canon hard at work designing different models of photo printers for every need and budget, the Canon i960 Photo Printer ($200 street), aimed at photo enthusiasts and professional photographers, comes as no surprise. The new entry delivers high-speed photo printing, the wider color gamut that typically comes with six-color printing, and the ability to print directly from PictBridge or Bubble Jet Direct-compatible digital cameras. What you won't find are slots for camera storage cards to let you print directly from the cards or transfer files—features that are often included on photo printers but rarely used by true photo enthusiasts, who prefer to view their photos on a large display and edit with the power of the PC and photo-editing software.

The i960 offers the same look we've seen in other Canon printers, with a three-color design in dark gray, beige, and silver. The PictBridge port for connecting a cable from a camera is conveniently located on the front. Like most of Canon's photo printers, the i960 uses a separate cartridge for each ink color and a separate printhead, so installation consists of installing the printhead, then snapping in each cartridge. This takes more setup steps than with most printers, but the arrangement keeps costs down, since you don't have to throw out unused ink when one color runs out. Our one gripe with many Canon printers is that they still use manual cartridge alignment in an age when most vendors align cartridges automatically. Canon is, however, starting to move away from that practice. The i960 handles at least part of the task automatically.

Output quality is good to excellent and easily in the same league as the best printers we reviewed for our inkjet roundup. Photos rate as true photo quality on glossy photo paper and surprisingly close to photo quality on plain paper. Graphics offer sharp edges and saturated colors, and text in default mode was readable at 5 points or smaller in most of the fonts we tested. We saw some slight posterization, but this occurred only in graphics designed to bring out posterization.

With 3,072 nozzles, the i960 can print at its claimed maximum 4,800- by 1,200-dpi resolution without making you wait forever. On our tests, the unit took between 1 minute 8 seconds and 1 minute 17 seconds to print 8- by 10-inch photos, making it significantly faster than the i950, which also has 3,072 nozzles. The 5.0- by 6.3-inch photo from our standard-quality suite took a speedy 37 seconds.

As expected for a printer optimized for photos, performance on standard business applications is relatively slow. We timed the printer at 1 minute 56 seconds for the 1-page Excel spreadsheet in our standard performance suite, and 4 minutes 10 seconds for the 12-page Word file in our performance suite, which is a noticeable—albeit somewhat expected—trade-off for the high-speed photo printing. Overall, its scores would have placed it in about the middle of the pack of the photo printers tested for our recent Printer Blockbuster roundup.

The slow speed for business applications means that unless you have extremely light printing needs beyond photos, you probably won't want the i960 as your only printer. But if you're looking for a six-cartridge printer that delivers photos in a hurry—particularly as a second printer—the i960 should be on your short list.