Ink jet technology has gotten so good, that seeing true photo quality output from an ink jet printer is no longer surprising. What's more, the devices produce output at reasonably high speeds. Although the $250 (street) Canon i950 Photo Printer doesn't have features like slots for storage cards used in cameras, the unit offers more than enough speed and output quality to earn the photo printer designation.

The i950 looks good, with its graceful lines and handsome beige, silver, and dark gray design. As with most photo printers, inside the box you'll find six ink colors—cyan, yellow, magenta, light cyan, light magenta, and black—for a wider color gamut than you get with just four inks. You'll also find a print head that produces 2 picoliter drops and resolutions of up to 4,800 by 1,200 dpi for fine ink-placement control. The extra colors and precise control contribute to the subtle shading you need for true photo quality.

As with most Canon printers, setup consists of installing a print head, snapping in the ink cartridges, and aligning the cartridges manually. Having to install the print head and a separate cartridge for each color takes more steps here than for most competing printers. But you can replace each cartridge independently of the others, which keeps costs down and makes this little hassle worth the effort. We can't say the same for the manual alignment routine, however—other ink jet printers handle this automatically.

Output quality is good to excellent. In addition to true photo quality on photo paper, the i950 prints photos at near photo quality on plain paper and produces good to excellent color graphics. Text is well-formed and reasonably dark, although not as crisp as text from a laser printer.

With 3,072 nozzles, the i950 can print its highest-quality photos at a fast pace. In our tests, 8- by 10-inch prints on photo paper required from 1 minute 15 seconds to 1:40, depending on the photo. In default mode on plain paper, an 8-by-12 photo took 51 seconds. Text speed was less impressive, at 2 pages per minute, but slow text speeds are par for the course with printers that are optimized for photos. If you print text often, you probably don't want the i950 as your only printer. But it's an excellent choice as a second printer for photos, and can also serve as a light-duty text printer.