Product Reviews

Mono laser printers are out of fashion with many manufacturers these days, as everyone from HP to Brother is crowing about how their fast single-pass colour machines will revolutionise business printing. This may be true in the long run, but for now there's still a staple demand for simple mono laser printers to handle basic duties such as letters and invoices. If you have similar printing needs, Canon's new Laser Shot LBP-1210 could be what you need.

Canon has generally been quite adventurous in the styling of its products, particularly scanners and inkjet printers. However, rather than try to modernise the LBP-1210's exterior, the company has sensibly retained the classic corporate design, albeit with a slightly adventurous translucent blue lid.

The LBP-1210 boasts a maximum output speed of 14ppm (pages per minute), which should be fast enough for most users' needs. The output resolution of 600 x 600dpi is fine too, and Canon includes an AIR (Automatic Image Refinement) mode, which it claims will deliver output quality closer to 2,400 x 600dpi. Connectivity options are similarly good, with both parallel and USB 2 inputs, catering for new and older computers. USB 2 is unlikely to make a noticeable difference to performance, though, considering the modest 14ppm spec. Canon also offers a version with 10/100BaseTX Ethernet for installation on a small network.

Paper handling is the final key feature for a laser printer, and unfortunately this is where the LBP-1210 falters. The main input tray only accepts 250 A4 sheets, supplemented by an additional ten from the manual input feeder. This isn't a major issue, but it means you have to split a full ream of paper and store the rest. Samsung's ageing, but still great, ML-6060 (see Labs, issue 83, p119) leads the way here by accepting the full complement of 550 A4 sheets.

Installation was a simple matter of inserting the toner cartridge, plugging in the USB cable and switching on. The driver installation went without a hitch and the LBP-1210 was ready for action in only a few minutes.

Performance testing kicked off with our usual 50-page plain text test printed at the default settings. The LBP-1210 started well, finishing the test in just under three and a half minutes at 14.4ppm. The text quality is superb too, with razor-sharp characters printed in a deep black. The

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Canon handled the 25-page letter test with equal skill, finishing in one minute, 44 seconds.

However, printing black text is hardly a rigorous test for a laser printer, so to give the LBP-1210 a tougher challenge we fed it our 12-page Excel spreadsheet test. This contains a mixture of shaded graphs and block-shaded tables, which contain text of varying point sizes, and poses a serious challenge to most mono laser printers. Unfortunately, the Canon wasn't quite up to the task, oversaturating the background fills and badly obscuring the underlying text. That said, shading in graphs was much better and on a par with the ML-6060. We were also unable to improve the results using the various Brightness and Contrast settings and Toner Density settings in the printer driver. The Samsung's still hard to beat in this area, smoothly shading the background fills so that text is crisp and clear. Performance also dropped during this test, although the speed of 12ppm remains respectable.

The LBP-1210's tendency to oversaturate solid shades was less evident in the 24-page DTP test, which printed at the full engine speed of 14ppm. The text quality was excellent again, although images tended to look scratchy and lacking in fine detail compared to the ML-6060's prints.

Our final test was the high-quality PDF newsletter, containing detailed graphics, high-resolution photos and text of varying typefaces. The LBP-1210's lack of fine detail and smoothness was apparent again, and we also noticed that some subtle blends had been replaced with a solid black. By comparison, the Samsung ML-6060 and HP's LaserJet 1200 (see Labs, issue 83, p119) produced more detailed results with less grain. That said, text was excellent again, precisely reproducing the various typefaces and font sizes in a strong deep black.

One of the benefits of buying a personal laser printer, as opposed to a cheap inkjet, is running costs. If you do a lot of printing, the cost of buying inkjet consumables quickly mounts up. The LBP-1210, on the other hand, is much more economical. The supplied toner cartridge lasts for around 2,500 pages at 5 per cent coverage and a replacement cartridge costs £56. This works out at about 2.2p per page, which won't break the bank. However, if you want to squeeze every last ounce of value out of the cartridge, Canon offers a toner-saving mode in the driver, which increases longevity at the expense of a little contrast.

The Canon Laser Shot LBP-1210 is ideal for small or home offices where the majority of print jobs are text-based. On the other hand, if you're planning to print images, it's bettered by the likes of Samsung's A-Listed ML-6060 and HP's LaserJet 1200, although an inkjet would be realistically more sensible for this sort of work anyway. Despite its reasonable all-round print quality, respectable running costs and decent one-year, on-site warranty, the Laser Shot LBP-1210 simply doesn't match up to its peers.