This is a printer for the photography enthusiast. Although you can print in black or colour on plain paper, its seven-colour print process - including photo cyan, photo magenta and red - cries out for full-colour, photo-based tasks.

Single sheets of A4 paper are fed down from a tray at the back and exit to a slide-out tray at the front. If you prefer to use 6 x 4-inch paper, there's a separate cassette assembly for this which slides in just in front of the main input tray. This all-plastic device looks a bit like an afterthought and doesn't work particularly well.

Once clipped in position, you're supposed to be able to move the 6 x 4 cassette up and down by turning a large knob on the front of the assembly. We found that moving the cassette back up again - when reverting to A4 media - was difficult, as it caught on one of the assembly's guides.

The Bubble Jet i990 uses a replaceable head and seven, equal-sized ink cartridges, each of which Canon claims will print 210 pages at 5% cover. It's easy enough to clip each cartridge in and you can replace any of them independently as they run out of ink.

We priced the cartridges at around £8.20 each, giving a total replacement cost for all seven of over £55. Assuming 25% total cover (around 3.5% of each colour or the area of a 6 x 4-inch print) and Canon's PP101 Glossy Photo paper (around 8.75p per quarter A4 sheet), this gives a cost per print of about 36.6p, a reasonable price given the versatility.

The printer can be connected through USB or USB 2 cables and, unusually, there are separate sockets for each type of connection. At the front there's a further USB port to connect a camera. The printer is specially geared to link to cameras supporting Canon's PictBridge standard, so you can use the camera to select and configure photo prints.

As well as a comprehensive printer driver, Canon supplies a good range of support applications. These include Easy PhotoPrint and ZoomBrowser EX, both suitable for basic re-touch and fancy print layouts, plus a utility for squeezing prints of wide Web pages onto A4 paper.

A full, bordered A4 page took just under two minutes to print, which is a respectable time for this size of print, though nowhere near the claimed 37 seconds: that must have been a very special test page. If you choose to print borderless, it can take up to half a minute longer, as the printer has to take extra care at each edge and feed the paper more slowly. Even then, it's pretty quick.

The prints we obtained from the Bubble Jet i990 were quite simply immaculate. From the faintest pastels to the darkest vivids, prints were natural and vibrant. Graduated shades were smooth with no banding and even where they bled to near-white, the extra, light-tint inks reproduced the image from the screen accurately and with great clarity.

Canon's Bubble Jet i990 is best thought of as a dedicated photo printer. It produces some of the best photo-prints you can currently get, with the increased colour gamut of its red, photo cyan and photo magenta inks improving pastels and vivid tints. While the 6 x 4-inch paper feeder could do with a redesign, in most other respects it's an ideal solution for digital photography enthusiasts.