Canon BJC-6100 review

One of the inkjet printer gripes I hear most often is that when one colour in a three-colour tank runs out, the rest of the inks are effectively wasted.

You have to ditch them and replace the lot. That's got to be good news for ink manufacturers' profits, but not such a rose garden if you print regularly in colour.

This is a problem that Canon has addressed with its latest bubble jet printer, the BJC-6100. It sports four individually replaceable ink tanks - seven, if you include the photo inks set. All this means you should never need to throw away usable ink again.

The Canon is a well-designed and well-built piece of kit. Its input tray has a decent capacity too, quoted as 130 sheets of A4 64gsm, which equates to 100 sheets of the more popular 80gsm paper.

By default, the BJC-6100 is a four-colour printer - C, M, Y, and K tanks sitting in a somewhat oversized green print head. Installing the assembly is quite simple - just flick two levers at either side of the head carriage. In turn, this allows the easy insertion and removal of the tanks themselves. Unlike printers from both HP and Lexmark, which have integrated heads and tanks (you change the ink and you're also putting in a new head), Canon's model apes the Epson ethos - you just change the ink. Unlike Epson's mid-range model, however, each colour of ink has its own tank, and, rather cleverly, each tank has a little window in it, which, when viewed from below - after you've removed the head from the printer - gives you an instant indication of how much ink is left in it.

This being a Canon printer, though, it has another guise - it's also a photo printer. To achieve the transformation, you remove the black ink assembly and, in its place, slot in the photo cartridge assembly - another three-tank setup that features lighter variants of both cyan and magenta, along with a smaller tank of black. While this makes for rather truer photographic output, it brings with it its own problems.

For example, our printer tests include a CorelDRAW 9 newsletter, which I followed with a print report. While the driver was happy to print the newsletter with the photo head, it wasn't happy with the mono print report in the same job, and refused to allow it to print until we'd changed the print heads over. Frankly, that's just too much hassle.

On plain paper, output disappointed. Text printed quickly and looked okay, but add in some graphics and you notice a lack of vibrancy in the colours. On glossy coated paper, though, things are very different. After a 15min print run, our 1440x720dpi test photo looked very nice - good contrast and exacting flesh tones. Similarly, the newsletter took on a new vitality, its colours leaping from the page, albeit after quite a wait. The BJC-6100 wasn't caught out by the awkward colour-matching in our newsletter headline, though it did suffer from some over-enthusiastic cyan ink that managed to streak the page a little. Whether this was a result of poor paper handling or a dodgy print head we don't know, but it spoilt what was otherwise a neat print.

Taking all this into account, the picture begins to look a little clearer. The BJC-6100 is a quite capable A4 photo printer, with the advantage of individual ink tanks, but each tank is quite tiny, and, as our February 2000 feature showed, it can cost up to £3 to print a single A4 photographic image.

So even though the separate tank idea seems nice in theory, the Canon's not as cheap to run as an Epson. Given that the Epson Stylus Photo 750 is also top on quality, the BJC-6100 comes a rather poor second.

Author: - David Dorn