Product Reviews

Canon may be a big name in the printer world, but it's a dodgy bet choosing a product purely on the basis of a brand name. Canon's printers haven't done so well recently, with print quality in particular falling behind the competition. Things are starting to pick up again, but the LBP-800 shows Canon still has some way to go.

Ease of use

With its curvy upright design, there are no cassettes to mess about with: when your paper runs out, just drop some more in at the top. Setup was a bit confusing at first,

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with the installation program deciding to run itself twice simultaneously, but everything worked fine in the end.

Print quality

You can play with output options such as greyscale dither patterns, brightness and contrast, but given the quality of the Canon's output, that level of adjustment looks like dressing mutton as lamb. Greys are speckled and on solid black areas the toner cracks too easily from the paper. Text loses its definition at lower point sizes, even in 600dpi mode.

Performance

One thing we can't deny: this is a fast printer. Not the fastest on test, but only a few seconds behind. It particularly loves to chew through graphics, as demonstrated when our supposedly challenging CorelDraw report test popped into the output tray in just 20 seconds.

Overall

One look at the price may make you want to call your favourite supplier and buy one. All we can say is that there are better low-cost lasers around. Being fast isn't enough: if you're going to take the trouble to choose a mono laser over a colour inkjet, you may as well get one with good output quality.