Labs

Canon's been playing catch-up in the inkjet arms race for some time now, with only its scanhead offering innovation and a unique selling point. That's changed with the advent of the Canon BJC-8200 this month, but this printer comes with a price to match its high level of quality.

The BJC-5100 is fortunately somewhat cheaper, considering its lack lustre performance, and fits into the company's range at the low to mid end. However, it does have the benefit of A3 size printing, although sadly it's very slow. In fact, in all but one test, it was slower than the entry-level BJC-4400, and the resulting quality really wasn't worth the wait.

The trial started with the photo test. This took a staggering 58 minutes, 30 seconds to print, while the complicated Corel graphic took just over half an hour. In both cases, the blacks were washed-out with excessive banding

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and, although on plain paper there was hardly any bleed, the same effect rendered what was meant to be black almost grey.

A small improvement on coated paper was balanced by the fact that we had to wait 59 minutes, 46 seconds for the test to finish, and even then the banding problem hadn't completely disappeared. Text on plain paper was the only test to finish in line with the others at six minutes, 29 seconds and finally provided above-average quality, beating all of the Epsons and the 5100's big brother, the BJC-8200.

In the resolution test things improved slightly. The results weren't as badly banded, but the lines weren't perfectly vertical across every pattern. Colour accuracy compared with the Pantone reference pattern was another high point, with the printer finishing fourth behind the Epson and HP units. However, the black and grey shading on the colour fades test was too warm, containing streaks and flecks of the component colours combined to produce them, and with stepping rather than blending between the different shades.

This is a budget A3 printer and should be treated as such. If A3 is a priority and any other type of output apart from text is going to be carried out, the extra £140 on the street for an Epson Stylus Color 1160, which shares the same cartridges and head as the Stylus 760 and 860, is a better bet. Even Canon's cheaper BJC-4400 manages to pull ahead of this model, which leaves it stranded in no man's land.