Canon BJC-8200
Price: AU$699
Distributor: Canon Australia
Ph: 02 9805 2000; Fax: 02 9888 3650
www.canon.com.au
Superficially, the 8200 does not look a lot different to the 6200. For example, I/O, controls and general functionality remain the same, but to leave this impression would be a gross injustice. Whereas all the other printers in this test are considered -jack of all trades"â€"a letter here a report there and the occasional photo print, the 8200 is neatly pigeonholed by Canon as a Professional Photographic Printer.
Yes, if push comes to shove the 8200 will print a letter or report; print a photo, however, and the 8200 takes you to a whole new level.
What has the 8200 got over Canon's other products to justify its claim of producing -Ultra Photographic Resolution"? For a start, the printer has six colour inks, black, cyan, magenta, yellow, photo cyan, and photo magenta. Each colour has its own ink cartridge so as one runs out you only change that colour. This helps keep waste and running cost down.
The printhead can also be easily removed and replaced with a new one should it ever become blocked or damaged and there is an optional snap in 600dpi scanner cartridge as well. The true print resolution is 1200 x 1200dpi and to quickly lay down this many dots per inch each colour has a 256 nozzle printhead. Each droplet is a tiny 4 picolitres (pl) and Canon claims its new star-shaped aperture on each nozzle results in more accurate dot shape and placement than the competition. Each pixel can also receive up to 42 of these 4pl dots resulting in extremely smooth graduations.
We were surprised to find that, in addition to the standard sheet feeder, the 8200 includes a manual feed at the rear which improves paper handling immensely with Canon claiming 500gsm can be accommodated.
The printer's documentation is very good indeed with a small User Guide that adequately covers printer operation and the most impressive Setup Guide we have ever seen. The Guide is 12 large pages covered with high-quality screen shots and coloured diagrams that hold your hand through every single stage of the setup process, right down to how to interpret the print head alignment pattern.
While each of the 8200 ink cartridges are relatively small they nevertheless managed to cover a lot of paper before expiring. The 8200's black cartridge is smaller than any of the other Canon printers and so it came as no surprise that it did not go as far, but with 340 pages output at 5 percent coverage it was still at least as good or better than the Lexmark printers. Colour life was a different story with one of the cartridges not giving up the ghost until it had printed 407 colour pages at 15 percent coverage. Only the relatively expensive HP high-capacity colour cartridge lasted longer (but with that one you must toss the entire cartridge; the 8200 features individual colours). Cost per black page breaks down to 8 cents per page. Our formula for calculating cost per page for the 8200 is even less fair or realistic given that it has five individual ink tanks (not counting black) and we only needed to replace one at the end of the 407 pages while cyan for example was still two-thirds full. So even though our calculations yield a page cost of 34 for a colour page, we would expect it to be well below 15 cents per page in reality.
As we mentioned earlier, the 8200 is an -artist" so its not great at banging out mundane things like letters and reports. It is in fact quite slow in the peak throughput test: 2.1ppm, which is a good deal slower than all the printers with the exception of the Brother portable. Average throughput is a reasonable 0.92ppm.
Ah, but now we step into its realm of expertise: photo output and here it pulled out all the stops and blitzed the field. At its highest quality mode it produced the photo test in an astonishing 3 minutes and 23 seconds for a throughput of 0.30ppmâ€"significantly faster than any of the other printers tested. The quality of the output was breathtaking. Even with a magnifying glass the individual dots are still very subtle. Colour fidelity was close to spot on with excellent skintones for example. Of the current batch of printers under test the output was undeniably superior, as one would expect given its specs.
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