Canon BJC 6000 review

With virtually every issue of Computer Buyer, we seem to see a new inkjet printer that raises industry standards in terms of photographic print quality, sharpness of text, speed or price.

For the buyer of course, all this change and development means you get more for your money. For the manufacturer, however, there's a pressure to come up with something new. This month, Canon has managed exactly that with its BJC-6000.

The Canon BJC-6000 doesn't look radically different from anything we've seen before. It's when you lift the lid, and the print head carriage trundles into view, that the BJC-6000 shows you something different.

Instead of the all-in-one colour head and separate black ink cartridge in, say, the Epson Stylus 440 or DeskJet 880C, the BJC-6000 has all four CMYK colours in individual sealed troughs. At the right-hand side of the printer's head carriage, you find cyan, yellow and magenta. Working through a separate head at the left side of carriage is a black reservoir, which, for obvious reasons, is larger than the other colours.

From an economic point of view this is good news, as all four component colours can be bought separately, costing £7 for coloured inks and £9 for the larger pigmented black tank.

What's even more interesting, however, is that you can remove the black print head and its assembly, and insert a photo head in its place. Again there's a complex tank arrangement, this time featuring individual photo cyan, magenta and black tanks. So, for the price of £32 you can transform the BJC-6000 from a colour printer into a photo printer. This is cheap, when you consider it costs £29 for a new black ink trough together with the associated print head.

We tested the BJC-6000 as a colour printer first and found it performed extremely well. With a mixed text/graphics document, running in its finest quality setting, the Canon produced black text that was dark, crisply formed and free of any running or blotching. Colour panels in our standard test document were similarly well produced, being free of banding - a problem lesser printers suffer from. To be highly critical, though, we did detect a minute amount of colour running between blue and yellow. This may be excused when you consider that we use standard photocopier paper, and not the higher resolution stock that a real stickler for perfection should invest in.

Moving to a standard black-and-white print run of ten A4 sheets, we found the BJC-6000 took two minutes 28 seconds to work through the job. This translates to around four pages per minute, running in its best quality setting. Shift the driver's emphasis from quality to speed and ten pages will be produced a rate of five pages per minute!

Next, we transformed the BJC-6000 into a photo printer, which was an easy job, and, after using the BJC-6000 software driver to realign the print heads, began a full A4 photographic image test. The results were impressive, with the Canon managing to represent shaded areas and natural tones well. Indeed, we felt the BJC-6000 to be on a par with the Epson Stylus Photo 750. However, when it came to printing light regions the Canon did not perform as well as the Epson, producing grainy shading instead of smooth pastels.

The Canon BJC-6000 is a capable all-rounder - it prints black-and-white text quickly and manages colour perfectly well. It makes some advance in whittling down the cost of printing by offering separate colour cartridges, which means you won't waste so much ink. (Over its working life, you can spend up to seventeen times the cost of an inkjet printer on consumables, so beware!) If, however, you're desperate for the best photo quality output in town, the Stylus Photo 750 is still the best buy.