Canon BJC-5000 review

The market for colour ink-squirting printers is getting bigger every day.

But the question most makers must address is how best to differentiate their product from everyone else's. The distinctive feature of the BJC-5000 isn't that it can print at 1440dpi - Epson's finest already do that - but that it can handle A3 paper.

A3 capability is bound to affect the size of any printer, and in the 5000's case the impact is considerable. Normal A4 paper is fed in a roughly straight line from top rear to front, spilling out onto a paper catcher. A3 paper, though, is fed horizontally into the rear of the machine. This makes for a perfectly straight printing path, but means you need space for almost the full length of an A3 sheet behind the printer, as well as in front of it. A3 paper is 420mm in length, so you'll need a whole metre of desk space!

The BJC-5000 is sturdily built. Its simple control set is top-mounted, poking up through the lid of the printer, and consists of a power switch, a large two-colour LED and small page-feed button. Setup is fairly straightforward, using a Canon installation routine, rather than the standard Add Printer route.

As we often point out, it's important not to neglect the quality of black text when assessing a colour printer's output. Most people print far more text than colour graphics, and even if you have a high colour workload, you're still bound to want to produce mixed documents with text captions or body copy. Blacks, in our book, should be 100% solid, with no specks of white in them - and definitely no banding or splattering. Indeed, at 1440dpi, text should be so sharp you could cut yourself with it. Epson's Stylus Color 740 produces just such output, and beside it the BJC-5000's black print is disappointing. Even using its auto-head alignment feature, textual output is splattery, and its black is riddled with speckles. To the naked eye, the blacks simply look a bit too light. Through a magnifying glass, though, you can see the underlying problem. Around 5% of the printed area has been missed. This makes headline-sized text look as though it has a bad case of dandruff, but even 10-point text looks watery.

Colour photo images don't fare much better. Contrast suffers, and there's a definite lack of punch and sharpness. At 360dpi and 720dpi things get worse: definite banding becomes evident. Inconsistent dithering of vector and bitmap graphics also makes grey levels unpredictable.

Worse, this disappointing printing takes an inordinately long time - our newsletter test print took over twice as long on the BJC-5000 than with the 740, and 75% longer than with the 640.

There is one thing to recommend the Canon: it can use A3 paper (albeit not with photo-quality printing). But the fact that it takes three feet of deskspace to do so rather sours the milk. And though it prints at 1,440dpi, the quality is far worse than that of rival A4 printers.

Finally, the tedious print times are a real turn-off.

Admittedly, the list price of £229 (£269) is very low for an A3 model, but if you need A3 we'd urge you to go for something more upmarket such as HP's DeskJet 1120C or Epson's Stylus Color 1520. If you don't really need A3, the A4 Epson Stylus Color 740 costs the same, and far outdoes the Canon in every other department.