Canon i-Sensys LBP2900B review

Canon's i-Sensys LBP2900B is one of the best-looking printers here. It is black with a clear plastic cover, which folds out to become a 100-sheet output tray. It is also available in white, with the model number LBP2900.

Like Samsung's ML-2010R, it's very cheap. This compact laser printer costs just £61 including VAT and has excellent print quality. Print costs were among the cheapest here at just 1.77p per page. Unlike many budget inkjets, this printer is cheap both to buy and run.

It was easy to set up, although we had to set it as the default printer manually after installation. Canon's printer driver includes some handy features, including an accurate and clearly visible onscreen page count.

The i-Sensys uses software resolution enhancement to give its 600x600dpi print engine an effective resolution of 2,400x600dpi. Although there's no option specifically to enable it, Canon's Automatic Image Refinement clearly works better than many of its rivals' equivalents. The quality and precision of printed text was outstanding. Small font reproduction was among the best here, and even tiny 5pt lettering was sharp and legible. Greyscale shading also looked good, although light areas in some of our diagrams and photographic images looked slightly grainy. Contrast and shading in photos was accurately reproduced. Neither pages nor envelopes were creased or seriously curled during printing.

The i-Sensys managed print speeds of just 10.6ppm when printing text documents and 10.9ppm in our mixed text and graphics test. It was fast printing greyscale photos, though. The first page of our text print emerged in 12 seconds. The printer didn't manage its claimed zero-second warm-up time, but printing from standby added only two seconds.

Despite slow overall print speeds, we were impressed by the quality of the prints and the low running costs. It's an ideal personal office printer, and a cheap-to-run home printer.