Canon BJC-2100SP
Price: AU$189
Distributor: Canon Australia.
Ph: 02 9805 2000; Fax: 02 9888 3650
www.canon.com.au
Editors' Choice
The next step up the evolutionary ladder after Canon's BJC-2100SP (tested last year) is the BJC-2100SP. At first glance, not a great deal has changed: the AC power supply is integrated, it takes identical ink cartridges and a scanner head can be installed in place of the print head to enable 360dpi scanning of documents and the likeâ€"bearing in mind of course that the item scanned must follow a lazy -L"-shaped path in common with the other Canon printers tested.
Resolution has not changed, staying at 720 x 360dpi for both black and colour but, in addition to the parallel port, the printer now sports a standard USB port as well. Even with this inclusion, the price has still managed to drop $10 when compared to the superseded model. The printer is quite small and light but not at all flimsy, we were surprised at just how robust it was.
The only button on the top of the printer has multiple personalitiesâ€"depending on the printer status and how long you hold the button, it functions as page feed, resume, print nozzle check pattern, and print head cleaning.
The User's Manual is extraordinarily detailed, more so than Canon's new range of more expensive printers, running to 240 pages that covers every aspect of the printer and its drivers. But that is not the end of the story: given the printers target market Canon has included three large fold-out -Getting Started" sheetsâ€"each a different colour. They cover PC with Parallel, PC with USB, and Mac with USB setup. We cannot possibly see how Canon can improve on the supplied documentation.
Printer drivers are almost identical across the board for the Canon product range. They are exceptionally user friendly and feature rich and, rather than go into verbose detail for all the printers in this comparison, we have instead inserted screen shots of the driver's functionality. The only gripe we had was that all of the Canon printers tested would not produce multiple copies with the current drivers from PhotoShop 5.0 LE. Selecting 20 copies from PhotoShop would only produce a single copy (we had to resort to setting the page layout properties in the printer driver to achieve the desired output). We found, however, the problem was confined to PhotoShop; MS Word, for example, happily printed 20 copies without resorting to directly changing the printer driver settings.
The Canon features no less than three different cartridge configurations for most printing tasks. For -high-speed" black only printing the large BC-20 ink/printhead cartridge is the choice. If you need to knock out some reports with text and coloured charts then pop in the BC-21e printhead, which consists of a small replaceable black cartridge and a CMY (cyan, magenta, and yellow) cartridge. But, if the task is a family portrait, for example, then the BC-22e Photo ink/printhead cartridge is the best for the job. Admittedly it can be a little annoying swapping cartridges around but remember: this is a very low cost printer.
Canon has taken advantage of the fact that the entire printhead assembly can be replaced and have produced pop-in scanner modules for each of the printers we tested. The small unit for the 2100SP for example has an optical resolution of 360dpi and the scanning process resembles printing except the printer is fed with the original to scan. That scanned data is sent to the PC.
Cartridge life is very good when using the beefy black cartridge: it output no fewer than 620 pages at 5 percent coverage for a cost of just 9 cents per page. The small -standard" colour cartridge managed just 160 pages at 15 percent colour, but it is a considerably longer life than the comparable Lexmarks, for example. Page cost in our colour tests ran to around 18 cents per page.
The rear sheet feeder has a 100-sheet capacity and can feed stock up to 105gsm.
Peak throughput is not too shabby at 2.8ppm but most of its price point competition sits above 3ppm and in one case, the HP 640C peaks at 4ppm. Setting the output quality to something a touch more realistic and feeding the printer the 4-page complex document brings the throughput right down to 0.69ppm, but then all of the other printers have the stuffing knocked out of them by this test also. In fact the HP 640C drops below the Canon, and the Lexmark is only marginally faster.
Print quality was quite good, though a little pale to some of our judges (though Canon claims that this is the intent of its printers, as it is a more -realistic" colour).
Considering its very low price point the results from the photorealism test are great. Admittedly you must substitute a photo cartridge for the standard cartridge to obtain this output but then this is the approach many of the other printers in the comparison take as well. The colour fidelity was surprisingly good, better than many of the more expensive printers at the drivers default saturation levels. Fine detail was also pretty good but the dot size at times is intrusive and as a consequence some of the dither patterns can be a touch coarse, relatively speaking of course.
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