Canon i-SENSYS LBP5300 review

Like the Xerox Phaser, Canon's i-SENSYS LBP5300 is a fast, single-pass colour laser printer. You can connect it directly to a single computer using USB, or use its network port to share it between users.

Unlike the Phaser 6180N, the LBP5300 prints only using a host-based driver. At this price, we'd normally expect a printer to support both PCL and PostScript print languages. The LBP5300's 250-sheet input cassette and 100-sheet multipurpose feed also seem basic for the money, but the printer has a duplex unit so it can automatically print on both sides of each sheet of paper. It's a useful feature if you want to save on paper or print long booklets with the minimum of fuss, but we've seen it on cheaper printers, such as Lexmark's C530dn, which we reviewed in last month's colour laser Labs test.

For a bulky colour laser printer, the LBP5300 is easy to unpack and set up. Canon's install program offers a choice of an Easy or Custom install, but the full software package comprises only a driver and user manual. Setup found the printer on our network and, other than a couple of dire-sounding warnings about our firewall settings, completed without incident. The print driver's layout will be familiar to anyone who has used a recent Canon inkjet, with the options logically split into four themed groups, each of which is displayed on a separate tab. The job-status monitor is particularly useful for a network printer that might be positioned in another room to the user, but we had to disable the shrill sound it played at the completion of each job.

Although Canon claims comparatively modest speeds for the LBP5300, it was able to get unusually close to them in our tests. This was particularly true for colour, where the printer's 18ppm on our Normal test was way ahead of the fastest printers tested last month. Photos also printed very quickly, with six 6x4in photos on three A4 pages taking just 25 seconds. Unfortunately, this speed appears to come at the cost of print quality. Colour photos suffered from a sickly, yellow-green pallor that had us worried for the health of our portrait subjects, and most other graphics were woefully off-colour. Black text, at least, was extremely good, with dark, crisp fonts right down to tiny two-point size.

We were impressed with the LBP5300's speed when duplex printing. It delivered our 50-page Draft test in two minutes and 33 seconds, printing it on 25 sheets of paper at a rate of 19.6 sides per minute. It's unusual for a printer to match its single-sided performance when printing both sides, and the LBP5300 is the first printer we've tested that practically achieves this. It's also fairly quick to start printing after a long period of inactivity, with a page of black text appearing within 18 seconds after the printer was left unused for a day. That's only six seconds longer than the same test took when the printer had been recently used.

The LBP5300's paper cassette is extravagantly labelled with directions for loading paper and clearing jams, but the icon representing the correct orientation is stamped into its metal base and is baffling. Fortunately though, the multipurpose tray is labelled clearly for paper and envelopes. The printer feeds envelopes very slowly, and prints them perfectly without any crumpling at all.

Canon supplies the LBP5300 with full-capacity toner cartridges, each of which is rated for 6,000 pages. This is generous, and reasonably priced replacements mean this printer will prove fairly cheap to own over the medium and long term, but not for very light use. This is encouraging, but it's not enough to offset the printer's comparatively basic specification and poor colour print quality. We can't recommend it at this price.