Product Reviews

Portable printers have been around for some years now and Canon's

BJ-10 and, more recently, its BJ-70 printers have been major players. The company's latest offering, the BJC-80, follows in the footsteps of its bigger desktop cousins by offering higher resolution on top of some innovative features.

The BJC-80 has everything that the travelling professional might need on the road. This petite printer has a smaller-than-average footprint for a portable (300 x 157mm), weighs a light 1.4kg and at 56mm thick will sit in most briefcases comfortably. A pop-out 115Kbits/sec infrared port is provided for cable-free printing, and if you're going to be printing away from the mains there's an optional rechargeable battery pack that clips onto the rear of the printer, but it adds a hefty £69 to the cost.

If you prefer to stick to cables, connection can be made via the standard parallel port on the rear of the printer. Once this is done, Windows 95 detects the printer with no problems: I was printing in less than ten minutes after unpacking. Included in the box are two types of cartridge: a large black-only cartridge, and for colour printing there's a four-colour cartridge with separate, renewable colour and black ink tanks.

Inkjet technology has advanced at a phenomenal rate over the past year, and it's clear that this has filtered down to compact printing. The maximum resolution of 720 « 360dpi is impressive for a printer this size, and although the BJC-80 asks you to swap between the colour and black cartridges, the four-colour process means you still get true black when printing in colour.

In testing, however, it was clear that the BJC-80 can't produce the same level of quality as the best colour inkjets. Even in high-quality mode on coated paper, text characters had rough-looking edges and thin lines were slightly stepped. In areas of solid colour, a small amount of very fine banding was apparent as well. These results were achieved using Canon's own

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high-resolution coated paper, but as expected the problems were accentuated when using lower-quality 80g/m2 copier paper.

On the positive side, colour blending and reproduction in general was extremely good. Dithering worked well to reproduce subtle shades with remarkable fidelity, which helped the BJC-80 to render some impressive photographic images.

Predictably, speed didn't turn out to be the BJC-80's fortÚ. Printing from a Pentium/166 system with 32Mb of RAM in best-quality mode, a heavily formatted three-page report with lots of different fonts, charts and vector graphics took a yawn-inducing 17 minutes, 16 seconds to land in the output tray. Using the same settings, a five-page plain text document struggled through in just over seven minutes. Even with the lowest-quality settings, I only managed to achieve a maximum of 3.5 pages per minute compared with the claimed 4.5.

The most innovative thing about this printer, though, is that for an extra £60 (£89 if you don't buy it at the time you purchase the printer) you can turn it into a colour scanner. By simply replacing the ink cartridge with a scanner head, you can scan at up to 300dpi in 24-bit colour. In practice, this produced some surprisingly good-quality scans, although close inspection revealed that the acquired image had a small amount of what appeared to be banding. Like the printing, scanning can be slow and frustrating. For example, at 360 x 360dpi, it took the BJC-80 just under eight minutes to scan a straightforward 6 « 4in photo. The reason for this is that the scanner head has to make three separate passes per line scanned: one each for red, green and blue colour components.

Running costs are higher than average, despite the fact that the refill system means you don't need to replace the head every time you run out of ink. Using the black-only cartridge, a page of A4 text at five per cent coverage turns out at an average of 3.2p, and colour pages at five per cent coverage per colour will cost you even more than the Xerox XJ4C (reviewed p165) at around 18p per page.

This is pretty impressive reading for a printer with a smaller footprint than this magazine, but the price tag isn't so good. This tiny bundle of joy will set you back £199, which is surprising considering you can get hold of a Lexmark 7200 or an Epson Stylus Color 600 (reviewed issue 33, p124) for not much more. And if you go for the full package with battery pack and scanner head, it will cost you a whopping £358. The Canon BJC-80 may be the best portable printer around, but it's expensive.