Canon BJC-4400

Canon's BJC-4400 is one of only two printers from our last round-up in issue 56 to be re-tested in this Labs. It shares this honour with the Epson Stylus Color 750, but performs far worse than that printer overall.

The second cheapest printer on test, the BJC-4400 is aimed at the budget end of the market, which is certainly the impression you get when handling the unit. It's lightweight but just about manages to fall on the wrong side of flimsy. In its favour, with its trays unextended, it does have the smallest footprint of any of the printers on test.

As a further space-saving incentive, the BJC-4400 has the option of replacing the ink cartridges with a scanner cartridge operating at up to 300ppi in resolution. However, it costs an additional £73, a price at which a much better quality standalone unit can be picked up.

As a budget printer the BJC-4400 is free from extras. There's only a standard parallel port connection, but there is a driver for Windows 3.x, unlike most units on test. NT users will have to look elsewhere, however. The driver is fairly simple once installed, presenting three levels of print quality settings and three different colour models.

However, even at best settings we found ourselves disappointed by its performance both in terms of speed and quality. It took just over ten minutes to produce 25 pages of plain text, equalling 2.5ppm, a far cry from the quoted 6.5ppm speed. On the plus side, this was the highlight in terms of quality: using the supplied mono-only cartridge, text was free of banding and surprisingly crisp, placing it an impressive third overall.

It took 11 minutes, 43 seconds to deliver the church interior photograph, which is reasonably quick. However, the quality of the reproduction was unconvincing and lacking in detail even when using the supplied photo cartridge, with many areas exhibiting graininess. Not surprisingly, it lands at the bottom of the table in this demanding test. The colour fades test highlighted its failings even further, with poor fading characteristics and exaggerated colour stepping.

The Canon BJC-4400 may be cheap but it doesn't have the advantage of separate ink cartridges for each colour like the BJC-8200. As such it's difficult to recommend, especially when an additional £12 puts the Epson Stylus Color 760 within reach.