Canon BJC-6200 review

Canon's BJC-6200 is an all-round workhorse: it uses Canon's 'photorealism technology' to produce colour photos.

At the same time, it's designed to be cheap to run thanks to individually replaceable inks.

Design

The BJC-6200's box contains more ink cartridges and tanks than you'd ever believe you'd need: a colour cartridge, black and photo cartridges, plus seven ink tanks. The 6200's driver has ready-made settings for particular jobs, each of which may require to you swap cartridges. Additionally, each cartridge may hold up to three individual ink tanks (CMY in the colour, CMK in the photo cartridge). This means that you can set a job going, only to be told you need to swap cartridges.

Print Quality

We can't knock the BJC-6200's colour balance in photo mode, but its dithering lacks density - under a magnifier, a fair bit of paper shows through where colours ought to be quite solid. Text and business graphics, in contrast, are good: blacks look suitably black, though with quite a bit of feathering at the edges of larger characters. It coped abominably with our newsletter headline, though.

Performance

Our weighted high-resolution tests proved the 6200 to be relatively slow - around 8mins' wait for a graphical A4 page at maximum resolution. It took a reasonable minute and half for the five-page, text-only test; slightly less for the mixed-mode single pager.

Overall

For this kind of money, I'd have liked to see a printed manual and a better turn of speed. Output is pleasing, but still not up to the quality of the best in the group, and at over 6p per colour page, the BJC-6200 is quite expensive to run despite its separate cartridges. In its favour, it's quite thrifty to run in mono-only.

Author: David Dorn