Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When this printer was announced by Canon, I was excited and couldn't wait to buy it. The workflow and features are so apealing but it has gloss problem. Let me give a bit of a background. When Epson 2200 came out, I rushed to store and bought it and found out that when printed on a premium glossy paper (simigloss and premium luster ok), the deep black parts of the photo are matted and when viewed in angle from the side the black parts appear almost negative. The paper itself is undoubtedly glossy but the gloss is gone once printed. (Yes, I selected the right type of paper in the print option.) Later, I bought a smaller Epson printer R800, the problem has been solved because the gloss-optimizer ink has been added. The reason I'm bringing this up is because I think Canon is playing catch up with Epson. Canon PIXMA Pro9500 has exactly the same problem as Epson 2200. The glossy paper become dull once printed. The black parts are matted and you can see discontinuity. It's almost like somebody colors the black parts by hand with matted ink. This is the most expensive printer on the PIXMA PRO PROFESSIONAL INKJET PRINTER product line. The reason I bought this printer is because I want to be able to print true B&W photos. Epson R800 has a problem mixing colors so a B&W photo comes out very unpredictably sometimes with warm tone, others with cool tone - never true B&W. PIXMA 9500 does a decent job because it has gray, matte black and photo black ink. B&W and gray come out beautifully, the problem with the black parts being matted is still there but less (than color photos). ICC profile works well. It automatically detects embeded color profile. Easy Print Pro software (both stand-alone and plugin for photoshop) works great and very intuitively. I printed Canon RAW (cr2) with Adobe RGB color profile in Photoshop the color comes out very accurate. I won't review other features because they are great. However, I can't get pass that the print quality is poor. For $850, this is a major rip off. I don't recommend this printer to digital photographers. Note: I just did more research and found that only Epson R800 and R1800 and HP Z series have a gloss optimizer which eliminates this very gloss differential problem. Both Epson R800 and R1800 are not designed for B&W photos. Epson R2400 will do B&W but it has the same gloss differential problem. I guess we can't have it all. For $850, Canon PIXMA Pro 9500 should have included a gloss opitmizer in this model design. I should have researched thoroughly before I bought this printer.