Canon BJC-3000
Price: AU$279
Distributor: Canon Australia.
Ph: 02 9805 2000; Fax: 02 9888 3650
www.canon.com.au
The new BJC-3000 from Canon certainly sets the cat amongst the pigeons at the sub-$300 price point. For your money you get a printer capable of 1440 x 720dpi and each ink is contained in its own independent cartridge. This is the lowest cost printer we have seen that has this separate-ink-cartridge featureâ€"all the other vendor printers at this price point (and sometimes substantially higher priced units as well) bundle the CMY inks together in the one cartridge. And, as we can testify after our testing of the printers, you definitely do not run out of all three inks at the same time. In many cases yellow ran out while we still had plenty of cyan and magenta left. With the 3000 it is an inexpensive task to just purchase a new yellow cartridge. In the case of the other vendors you must toss away the old cartridge with its remaining cyan and magenta inks and purchase a much more expensive triple colour cartridge.
Of course the Lab staff really appreciate neat little innovations, and starting with the 3000 and continuing on up the Canon line, the printers have an optical ink level sensor. It works like this: each cartridge has a tiny plastic prism in the base, and when the ink covers it any light projected through it simply gets absorbed by the ink. When the ink falls below the prism, the air on the other side of the plastic, rather than ink, results in total internal reflection in the prism and light is bounced back to a waiting sensor. Pretty cool, and much more accurate than the systems used by many of the other vendors, some of whom simply estimate when the cartridge is empty.
The printer looks pretty much like its larger brethren: it sports both a parallel and USB port with a single status LED and power and form feed controls located on top of the printer. Yes, a scanner cartridge can be fitted in lieu of the print head and it features twice the resolution of the 2100SP's at 720dpi.
Cartridge life is good in black, outputting 420 pages at 5 percent coverage, and very good in colour with 347 pages at 15 percent. This equates to 7 cents per black page and 24 cents per colour page. But, and it is a very big but, this does not take into account that you only need replace whichever single cartridge has expired at a small cost of $27.64. So, in reality, the actual page cost is far less for colourâ€"conservatively around half the cost: 12 cents.
Paper handling is pretty typical with up to 100 sheets of A4 following a pretty lazy -L" paper path from the ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) with the maximum recommended stock 105gsm. Documentation, while not quite as good as the exceptional 2100SP, is still very good indeed with the three Getting Started guides for PC Parallel/USB and Mac USB setup.
The price is very good and so is the output quality so it comes as no surprise that peak throughput, at times, has suffered slightly. All black printing is no problem with a BC-30 print head installed that supplies 160 black print nozzles the 3000 manages a pretty respectable 4.8ppm right in line with the BJC-6200. However if you pop in the BC-33 print head with just 48 nozzles for each of black, cyan, magenta, and yellow then all-black printing drops back to a more sedate 2.3ppm. Average throughput with the complex Word document (by necessity using the BC-33 print head) found the 3000 dropping back to just 0.37ppm. Admittedly output quality in both cases was very good and definitely a cut above the 2100SP with better character formation and darker, more even, black fills.
The performance news was not all bad with the 3000 posting a pretty impressive 0.18ppm in our photo print test, outperforming all the other Canon products with the exception of the awesome 8200.
Photo quality was really quite good but not a great deal better than the 2100SP, which really shows how good the 2100SP is. The -drop modulation technology" present in the 3000 and higher speced Canon printers varies the size of the ink droplet on the page and this did result in slightly finer dithering when compared to the 2100SP that lacks this feature. The colour, particularly blue skies, was more realistic than the 2100SP but again not by much. As far as we are concerned, there is nothing better than the BJC-3000 for under $300.
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Thats really good printer,These would be useful in the work place who are using printers.Like in the office. This may be a big help to make their work easier. Thanks for sharing this information. Have a good to all of you.
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