Product Reviews

Time was when you'd be grateful for the odd splash of colour to spice up otherwise drab office documents. Back when most personal printers were noisy, slow and dot matrix, colour text seemed a luxury. Nowadays top inkjet printers are able to produce near-photographic quality, and with manufacturers continuing to make advances in both technology and print quality, these levels of performance are gradually trickling down to the budget devices.

Canon's latest offering, the BJC-2000, is evidence of this trend: a full colour, photo quality-capable printer for just £119! Until relatively recently, budget printers still meant lower resolutions, fewer colours, and inferior print quality. But the BJC-2000 boasts a maximum resolution of 720x360dpi, a four-colour cartridge and the same 'dot-modulation' technology used by its larger siblings. It can also become a 'photo printer' with the addition of an optional photographic cartridge, or even a 360dpi scanner by installing one of Canon's unique ISIS 'scanner heads'.

One problem that continues to afflict cheaper printers, however, is poor build quality. The BJC-2000 feels insubstantial. The paper support that extends loosely from the front is particularly flimsy, and the input tray at the rear seems far too short to properly support a sheaf of A4 without the paper sagging. It's not a patch on

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the solid construction of HP's DeskJet 690C (see page 48).

Still, it's straightforward to set up. Open the small hatch at the front of the printer to automatically bring the print heads to the centre. Then just plug your cartridge in, close the hatch, install the software and you're away.

So how did the BJC-2000 perform? The simplest and most common print job is the plain text document, printed on plain (80gsm) copier paper, and here the Canon did pretty well. At standard quality, a five page text document dropped into the output tray after 2min 18sec - about 2.2 pages per minute. The quality, too, was surprisingly good for such a cheap printer. Only on close inspection does one see a small amount of feathering around the edges of characters.

Start to add a little colour and complexity to your plain paper printouts, and the BJC-2000's shortcomings become apparent. With a three-page business document combining graphics and charts with text, the results on plain paper (which emerged after 4min 23sec) were pretty hideous: loads of ink-bleed around colour text and banding in areas of solid colour. Even HP's stalwart, the 695C is more impressive here.

But once you use coated paper, the improvement is dramatic. Banding and ink-bleed vanish, and you get smooth colour fades, crisp, sharp detail and subtle shading - although the dots are more easily spotted than with top-end inkjets. If you use Canon's glossy photo paper, the BJC-2000 can reproduce photographic images competently even without its dedicated photo cartridge.

There's no doubt that, at just £119, the BJC-2000 deserves recommendation as an ultra-cheap text printer. Just be aware that its colour printing, though commendable, is expensive: 14.6p per page for the ink, and nearly 10p per page for the vital coated paper. So if you need to print a lot of colour, you'd be better off spending more for a printer that performs better on plain paper.