Product Reviews

There's a side of every PC user that says bigger is better, but in a situation where you're carrying your equipment about with you, bigger usually means heavier, and we're not all Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Step forward Canon and the new BJC-50 portable printer. Little wider than an A4 sheet of paper and a matter of five inches deep, it weighs a scant 2lbs fully laden - that's about the same as a bag of sugar. In the hand, it feels lighter, but not flimsy. Indeed, it's quite a solid little beast.

The BJC-50 comes equipped with all manner of goodies. Aside from the battery pack, the full complement includes both black and colour print heads, as well as tiny replacement colour and black cartridges. The colour cartridge will last for roughly 40 pages at 7.5 per cent coverage (for each colour), while the dedicated black cartridge will give 5 per cent coverage to around 170 pages in high quality mode. For a portable, these figures are pretty good.

Alongside that, there's the small scanner head that simply slots into the printer - more on this below.

The BJC-50 is a doddle to hook up. It boasts a special, short parallel lead because there's little room for a full-size Centronics port on the printer itself. You can also communicate via the IrDA infra-red standard. This gives completely wireless operation, though you'll need an infra-red port on your PC too, and only recent portables are so equipped. Attaching the BJC-50 to the parallel port under Windows 98 gives rise to a prompt for the drivers to be installed.

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This proceeds in the usual effective fashion, so installation is a breeze.

The driver is Canon's usual one with saveable settings, and very easy to use. In most cases, the standard settings will suffice, producing reasonable output with no effort. And it's quite wierd to see it working with no wires attached.

Output quality is not as good as with Epson's current crop of desktop machines, but to the naked eye, it's more than acceptable. Blacks are black, and gross splatter onto plain paper is not too noticeable. Colour graphics are clean and fairly crisp, although there was some evidence of banding on our newsletter test page. Greyscales are not the BJC-50's strong point, but for a portable printer, general output is extremely good - and quiet. If you print off a brochure or quote for a client on site, they're sure to be suitably impressed.

And, so, to the minuscule scan head. Setting the unit up to act as a scanner is no more difficult than installing a small application - in fact, that's effectively what you're doing.

It takes a matter of minutes - then you're ready to go.

In our tests, every time we tried to scan using the default settings, the unit asked for a white card to calibrate itself against before the photo to be scanned could be fed into the printer. Once that's done, the scan takes place. It's not the quickest scanner - a full A4 graphics scan takes 15 minutes - nor (at 360dpi) is it particularly high resolution, but the end results are really rather good, and worth waiting for.

At an RRP of £269 (£316), plus £89 (£105) for the scanner head, you're looking at over £400 for the bundle - as ever, you have a premium to pay for portability. Had the BJC-50 been a desktop printer, we'd have said it was priced out of the market, but as a portable, all-in-one solution (and given the price discounts that are sure to be available - you can reckon on knocking 20 per cent off RRP) it's not bad value for money.

Its price knocks just one star off its rating. If you can get it at a street price of £300, it warrants five stars and strong recommendation.