Canon BJC-6000

The BJC-6000 is similar in many ways to its sibling, the 7100. It's almost the same size and shares a similar form factor, but it has more aesthetic curves whereas the 7100 sports hard edges. Like the 7100, the 6000 has separate black and CMY cartridges, but the 6000 is superior in that each individual colour chamber is replaceable, as is the black, without having to replace the print heads. Each chamber lifts out easily, and they're translucent so you can see how much ink is left. Making the ink containers translucent is a useful and simple feature that's surprisingly rare. The 6000 comes with a separate photo-colour cartridge but, unlike the 7100, this replaces the standard black cartridge and contains smaller black, light cyan and light magenta chambers, effectively turning the unit into a six-colour printer. The drivers, which are functionally identical to the 7100's, helpfully remind you that changing a cartridge requires print head realignment. The drivers can do this automatically, but you can opt for manual if you don't like the results.

As with all Canon printers, the paper stands near-vertical at the back of the unit and feeds through to the front. The 6000's output tray is telescopic and at least keeps your prints off the desk, unlike the 7100's. If you need to manually feed in thick media, you'll need to stretch right round to the back, which is inconvenient but does mean that the paper path is as straight as possible, reducing the possibility of jamming.

Despite the increased number of colours over the 7100, the 6000's performance when printing a colour photo wasn't quite as good - the dithering was a touch grainier close up, and some details were lost. Plain-paper quality left rather a lot to be desired - although fast, the default settings meant our CorelDraw test was blocky, with ordered dither spoiling the graduated highlights of the image. Colour accuracy on both plain and coated paper was not the best, with the unit scoring in the lower half of the field. But in the rest of the coated-paper tests it fared well, with little evidence of banding and very good text quality.

In terms of speed the BJC-6000 put in a good performance, churning through the tests without too much delay and placing fifth overall, in stark contrast to its more expensive sibling.

If you're looking for superior image quality in a Canon printer, the BJC-7100 is the better bet. Overall though, the BJC-6000 comes out as the best choice.

Author: PC Pro Labs Team