Canon BJC-4550

As an A3 colour printer at a street price of under £300, the Canon BJC-4550 is a tempting machine. It offers 720 « 360dpi in black and colour, and an optional near photorealistic cartridge for high-quality colour prints.

The BJC-4550 is similar in style to existing printers in the 4000 series, with a paper feeder for about 100 sheets at the upper rear of the machine, and the paper exit at the front and bottom. Although at 445mm the machine is wider than other 4000 series printers, it's still much smaller than other A3 machines like the Epson Stylus Pro XL (reviewed issue 22, p84).

Unlike HP printers, where the cartridge and head combine into a single replaceable unit, the BJC-4550 has a removable head mechanism. This takes two ink tanks, one containing black and the other cyan, magenta and yellow. The BC-21 cartridge and BCI-21 tanks (as in the BJC-4000) are rated at 200 pages at 7.5 per cent coverage in standard mode, and half that in high-quality mode. The head needs replacing every 20 tanks. On the street, the black tanks cost about £7 and the colour tanks about £13.

Optionally, the BJC-4550 can use Canon's BC-22 Photo Ink cartridge. This replaces the BC-21 cartridge and tanks completely, and is only intended for use with high-resolution photo paper. The cartridges can be switched quickly and simply. Canon also offers a high-capacity black-only cartridge and a fluorescent cartridge for vivid colours (£29.99), but neither was supplied with the review machine. Additionally, Canon offers a wide range of media, including plain, bubblejet and high resolution paper, transparencies and back-print film, gloss and high-gloss paper and fabric.

Installation was simple, except for a single 'gotcha'. The machine didn't work very well with the lpt.vxd file installed by Windows as a default; some pages refused to print and others ejected halfway. This was solved by replacing this file with the version 4.950.503 file (from the DRIVERSPRINTER

LPT directory on the Windows 95 CD).

The physical operation of the printer is straightforward, with only two buttons (power and resume) on the case, and a further button inside to move the head into position for changing ink tanks. All the work is done in the Windows drivers. These are intelligent enough to check that various settings make sense. For example, printing in Photo mode prompts you to change paper to the high-resolution stock if you haven't already done so, and also offers to make the change for you.

The most common printer options can be selected using predefined buttons, but there are three user-configurable settings as well, letting you save combinations of settings that suit particular jobs.

Print performance is reasonable. Canon claims 5ppm in black and 1ppm in high-quality colour. As always, these figures need careful interpretation. Our colour test page took more than four minutes to print, as did a full-page A4 photo (in standard colour mode). The same photo in Photo mode with the optional cartridge took nearly 12 minutes to print. A single page report printed from Word took 48 seconds in draft, 63 seconds in standard and 110 seconds in high-quality mode. Surprisingly, text output was better in standard than in high quality mode. High-quality mode was slightly heavier, but no clearer, and showed slight signs of ink bleed.

Colour performance is good, with a reasonable balance and bright colours on standard non-coated inkjet paper (PlusJet). They tend to be a little thin, however, and a comparison with HP's DeskJet 870 shows a marked inferiority. Bright red is weak compared with the HP, and the black can't match HP's pigment-based inks. The differences, however, only tend to show up when you compare directly. It's not that the 4550 is poor, but rather that the HP is very good. For most print jobs, you're unlikely to be disappointed.