Product Reviews

After a great leap in the physical capabilities of inkjet technology last year, it seems that development is slowing down. Manufacturers are now looking for more than just pure resolution to make their printers stand out from the crowd. Nowhere is this more evident than in Canon's latest range of colour printers, to which the BJC-4560 is the latest addition.

In common with the BJC-80 (reviewed issue 41, p168), the 4560 can be turned into a 360dpi, 24-bit colour scanner by simply replacing the ink cartridge with the optional scanner cartridge (£79). This is a remarkable feat of engineering that produces some quite decent scans; colour accuracy is particularly impressive. But the scanning technique, which involves the head making a single pass for each of the primary colours (red, green and blue), is slow and produces a fine banding of the kind typically seen in poor inkjet printouts. It's useful if you're absolutely desperate for space, but you can buy a very good sheet-fed scanner like the SmartPage Pro (reviewed issue 42, p172) or a more flexible flatbed for not a lot more cash.

Apart from this innovation, the Canon 4560 features other improvements over its predecessor, the BJC-4550 (reviewed issue 33, p122). Although it uses the same 720 x 360dpi print engine and the speed remains the same, both ink cartridges and driver software - the key components for print quality - have received upgrades. The new cartridge uses Canon's Drop Modulation Technology to produce ink dots of varying sizes, which should allow the printer to produce more subtle shading and more intense colours. The 4560 follows the 4550 in its ability to print on A3 paper. It also has the same arrangement for photographic printing, which requires you to change to the optional photo cartridge (£28) when needed.

Unfortunately, there appears to have been little effort to improve the interface of the printer driver software - it looks identical to every other Canon driver I've seen for the last year or

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so. Installation is pretty seamless, but the driver doesn't automatically take you through cartridge alignment like Lexmark's driver does, and there's no ink level gauge or a progress monitor during printing.

What seem small improvements on paper over the 4550 translate to a dramatic improvement in print quality in practice. The dots produced by the 4560 are generally much smaller than those produced by the 4550, which results in smoother graduated fills and less grainy photographic output. Colour matching is also a significant improvement, especially when reproducing shades of grey and black. The 4560 retains the same high level of quality when printing straightforward black text even on plain copier paper and is only bettered by Lexmark's Colour Jetprinter 5700 (reviewed p156) and 7200 (reviewed issue 40, p168).

These impressive results were achieved using Canon's own High Resolution Paper and photographic stock, but colour printing on plain paper is a different story. A simple report containing colour tables and bar graphs as well as plain text revealed a considerable amount of ink seepage between areas of adjacent colour. In addition, large areas of colour produced wrinkled, over-saturated prints.

Print speed is a little below average, although it ultimately depends on the speed of your PC and the complexity of the print job. Printing plain text I only managed to achieve 2.1ppm (pages per minute) in standard quality and a maximum of 2.7ppm in draft mode. A colour, A4 CorelDraw image took just under ten minutes to print. Set the print quality to high, however, and the time taken to print even the simplest jobs increases to an unacceptable level. The aforementioned text test, just five pages in length, took 19 minutes and 45 seconds to land in the output tray.

For standard colour and monochrome printing, the 4560 costs around the same amount of money to run as the Lexmark Color Jetprinter 5700 - 3p per mono A4 page at five per cent coverage, and 13.4p per colour A4 page at five per cent coverage per colour. Photographic costs are somewhat more expensive, however, at 37p an A4 page, again at five per cent coverage per colour. Either way, it's not as cheap as HP's DeskJet 720C or 890C (reviewed issue 38, p168), both of which cost a paltry 4p per colour page to run.

The BJC-4560 is also a bigger investment than its competition. The dot modulation technique works well to produce excellent output on the right paper, but in the end the price tag of £279 means that only those who absolutely have to be able to print on A3 should consider it.