Product Reviews

Inkjet printers came as a godsend to the home user, who was, until their invention, condemned to a life of endless and agonising noise - noise produced by the dot matrix printer, which would have been all that they could afford. Inkjet or bubble jet technology (as Canon likes to call it), became a reality at the end of the 1970s, but it has only been in the past couple of years that it has become an affordable reality to the masses.

The BJC-240 strongly resembles its predecessor, the BJC-210. The front panel is rounded and smooth, with a single power light set into it. Pulling the panel at either side allows easy access to the print cartridge. Changing the cartridge is simple with a single lever clamp holding it in place. The only other features on the case are the power and resume buttons located on the top panel. The autofeeder holds a maximum of 100 sheets of A4 paper, there is, however, no output tray, meaning the printout is discharged to the work-top in front of the unit. Handling an array of different paper, both glossy and standard without blinking an eye, the BJC-240 went on to prove that envelopes were also no problem whatsoever.

We connected the canon to a 100Mhz Pentium system with 16Mb of RAM, where it was detected by Windows without incident. The driver also loaded and configured itself without the slightest hitch.

The Canon BJC-240 is priced in the budget category, which is a market that is becoming more and more aggressive, with strong competition from Epson and Hewlett Packard. As is the case with its two competitors, the Canon uses a CMY (Cyan, Magenta

& Yellow) printing system. This means that the print cartridge constructs the whole spectrum of colours from the three process colours, with 100% of all three producing

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black, or at least an approximation of black. Because this kind of black is not always convincing a black-only ink cartridge can be swapped for the colour one giving far better results and speeding the printing process up considerably.

The difference in quality between the CMY black and true black on the BJC-240 is immense. Not only is the colour darker and more solid, the shape of the characters is far more clean, making the overall text far easier to read. There is also a vast difference in the time it takes to print text. A five page text document printed with the colour cartridge took 11mins 12s, which is less than a page per minute (ppm), whereas the same document printed with the monochrome cartridge flew through in only 2mins 20s (just over 2ppm). Of course logic now dictates that you should always use the black cartridge when printing text. However, if you are printing out a document that has text and graphics (a Powerpoint presentation for example), you are stuck with poor quality text characters.

Colour print quality is not awe-inspiring, but acceptable considering the price, however don't expect to be running off multiple copies unless you have a lot of time on your hands. A full colour Corel DRAW! picture took just over 7mins to complete, at a resolution of 360dpi (dots per inch) The colours produced are vivid but not as smooth as might have been expected. Banding (stepped graduation of colour) is often apparent in subtle shades. Surprisingly, for a printer at this price, there is little or no feathering (ink spreading into the contours of the paper) in both monochrome and colour printouts. The ink is also bone dry once it leaves the printer and will not smudge, no matter how hard you try. Talking of ink, a replacement colour cartridge will set you back £21 (£25) with a black cartridge costing £17 (£20). For better results with photographic images, there's a special replacement colour cartridge available that costs £24 (£28).

If you are on a tight budget and desperately need to use colour, then the Canon BJC-240 offers a good entry-level solution. Easy installation and intuitive drivers add to its appeal. However, if you feel you are going to need quality colour and a reasonable print speed, it might be worth saving a few more pennies and going for the HP Deskjet 820 Cxi, which we recommended in issue 67.