Canon LaserShot LBP-5000 review

The lasershot LBP-5000 is the new single-pass colour laser from Canon.

It prints colour pages at an impressive 8 pages per minute - twice the speed of the LBP-5200 that we reviewed in last month's group test. Text print speeds were less impressive though, 8ppm compared with 19ppm for the LBP-5000 and 25ppm for our Best Buy, the Epson AcuLaser C1100.

This being the case, you'd expect top-quality colour prints from the Canon. While results weren't bad, they weren't outstanding either. For business graphics involving lots of solid colours, such as charts and graphics, the LBP-5000 is very good. Colours were bold, clean and accurate - even greys, which colour lasers often have trouble with. Photo quality was generally excellent. Colours looked a little faded compared with the high-quality photos you'll get from an inkjet, but were on a par with most good colour lasers that we've seen. Text, as we'd expect, was flawless, but good as the LBP-5000's print quality was, however, it wasn't as match for that of the Epson AcuLaser which

The Epson prints razor-sharp text and bold, lively colours - we haven't seen any other colour laser at this price that can compete.

Print speed was exactly what Canon claims it to be. Both our tests, colour and mono, printed at 8ppm - going up to 9ppm for pages with fewer graphics. This is faster than the Epson for colour pages, which only managed 5ppm, but far, far slower on text pages, which the Best Buy Epson churned through at an impressive 23.8ppm. Given that this is a budget laser printer, most people buying it won't be able to buy another model solely for printing text - so it really needs to be able to print text pages a lot faster than it does.

Sadly for Canon, the LBP-5000 doesn't do well on running costs, either. It cost 0.7p more to run per text page and 1.9p more per colour page. This may not seem much, but if you do a lot of printing it will soon add up.

The LaserShot LBP-5000 is a good colour laser printer that produces nice-looking prints at a decent speed, but printing text slows it right down. And, good as it is, it's not as good as our Best Buy printer, the Epson AcuLaser C1100 (£220 inc VAT).