Canon BJC-80 review

Portable printers may seem to be just for mobile users but, in fact, they're ideal for anyone looking for an inexpensive machine that can be easily moved around the house.

Canon has been in this marketplace for years now and its latest BJC-80 builds on past experience.

Physically, the Canon is identical to the earlier BJC-70, measuring a very petite 300x157x57mm, which equates to about half the volume of a standard notebook. At 1.4Kg it's not too heavy either.

However, while it's small, the true portability is compromised to a degree because, as standard, the machine only comes with a mains adapter, albeit quite a small one. If you want to work away from a wall socket you'll have to budget £69 (£81) for an external battery which attaches to the rear and also pushes the weight up by another half kilo. It will power the machine for up to 200 pages though.

The Canon is very well designed. The plastic cover which protects the printer in transit hinges up towards the rear and becomes an integral auto-feeder which can hold up to 30 sheets - very useful if you're a heavy-duty user. There's also a sliding plastic tab that enables the feeder to handle single items such as envelopes, overhead projector acetates and label sheets. All printed copy exits face up through a slot at the front. This flexible paper handling makes the Canon the most able portable printer on the market.

Like the earlier BJC-70, this model is colour capable. The standard black ink cartridge can be replaced with a colour unit at the press of a button. One good feature here is that the colour unit consists of two separate reservoirs; one for black and a larger three-colour unit containing cyan, magenta and yellow. In use, this means that when you print colour documents any areas of black, such as text, are printed using true black rather than a muddy composite colour.

In fact, the output quality of the Canon was as good as you'll see from any portable inkjet. Using the black cartridge in top quality 720x360dpi mode with edge enhancement, our documents reproduced with good clarity and there was only slight roughness in the characters when viewed close up. Thankfully, there was little ink bleed into the paper.

In colour mode the printer again did well with vibrant accurate colours, although the dithering was very visible and not as fine as the best desktop colour inkjets. Print times were typical for inkjets at around 90 seconds for a full page of black text but much more for colour bitmaps.

So far the BJC-80 is little changed from the earlier model, but one new feature that will be welcomed by notebook users is the infra-red port at the rear-left which means you can dispense with a printer cable if your notebook is similarly equipped.

The other major change marks something of an innovation for any inkjet printer, in that the machine can also double up as an image scanner. This is done by replacing the ink cartridge with the small IS-12 scanning head which moves horizontally to read the image as it's fed through the printer, just like a piece of paper. It all sounds a bit Mickey Mouse but it works extremely well. The scanner costs just £89 (£105) extra and offers up to 360x360dpi scanning at up to 24-bit accuracy.

The bundled software is very straightforward and lets you specify scan settings and image size. The settings include lower resolution monochrome modes for when you're scanning a document in order to fax it, and modes for greyscale images. The scanner is also TWAIN complaint so you can run it from within a program like Paint Shop Pro.