Printer News

Canon LBP3100 laser printer

alanx13 — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:22:32 +0000

The Canon I-SENSYS LBP3100 mono laser printer is one of the latest in a long line of personal laser printers and is available for about £90. This ice-white coloured unit has clearly been designed to take up as little space as possible.

This small space creates a slight problem, because of it the Canon printer toner cartridge is also small and in the Canon LBP3100 the toner cartridge only has a capacity to print 1,500 pages. This means that perhaps you will be forced to replace the toner more frequently than you would like.

The top opens forwards to make the output tray for the printer. The input tray is located at the front of the Canon I-SENSYS LBP3100. It folds down and has an integral dust cover which stops the up to 150 sheets of paper getting dusty. I like what they have done with the dust cover as it will always remain safe. A single page slot is located just above the dust cover which can be used for a variety of purposes.

The only controls on the front of the Canon I-SENSYS LBP3100 are the power button, a resume button and a green LED to indicate power. The rear has a USB socket.

You will have the Canon I-SENSYS LBP3100 working in no time as the only thing you have to do is install is the driver on your computer. The only consumable for the machine is the printer cartridge which is inserted via the top hatch. The provided toner cartridge will do a maximum of 700 pages but the only replacement toner cartridges you can get will do 1,500 pages and you can get Canon or compatible ones.

Canon claims the LBP3100 is capable of printing at 16 pages per minute (ppm) which proved to be not far off the mark as in tests a 20 page text print was completed in 15.2ppm while a 15 x 10cm photo was printed in 15 seconds. Considering the cost of this machine these results are more than acceptable.

Not only were the print speed good but, generally, the Canon I-SENSYS LBP3100 also produced good quality prints. Text was clear and well defined but grayscale did show a little banding and different tones were not as clearly defined as they might have been.

The quality of the photo print was OK with just about acceptable levels of detail. Of course this is a black and white printer and was not designed with photo printing in mind.

The Canon I-SENSYS LBP3100 produced noise levels peaking at 63dBA which is somewhat higher than Canon’s claimed 50dBA and could prove irritating if the printer is situated near you.

The Canon I-SENSYS LBP3100 is available for roughly £90 and at the price it produces excellent text prints and reasonable graphics and photo prints.

Canon Pixma iP2702 inkjet printer

alanx13 — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:06:53 +0000

At a price of just £45 the Canon PIXMA iP2702 is one of the cheapest single-function inkjet printers on the market. Clearly this is intended for people who only do a small amount of printing.

The iP2702 was simple to setup. The build quality did not feel that great but it looks OK in an unfussy sort of way. The paper is loaded from a tray which folds back and it has a capacity of 100 A4 sheets You will have to be careful where you put the printer as there is no tray for completed work. On the top right of the printer are two control buttons, with LED indicators, for power and for paper feed and error control.

At the back of the machine are sockets for power and USB only, there are no other connection options.

The Canon PIXMA iP2702 has two printer ink cartridges that are accessed by raising it’s hinged cover. When you do so the head carrier slides into a convenient position. You get a 9ml PG-510 black cartridge and 9ml CL-511 ink cartridge with the printer but the better value PG-512 (15ml) and CL-513 (13ml) can also be used.

Software provided with the iP2702 Includes Canon’s Easy-PhotoPrint EX and Easy-WebPrint EX. There is also a copy of the user manual included on the software disc. You can make alterations to images using Easy-PhotoPrint EX although it has relatively limited functionality. However all the basics are covered including photo-fix and red-eye correction. With Easy-WebPrint EX you can capture bits of Web pages and then print them in a format of your choosing.

The Canon PIXMA iP2702 does not print particularly quickly but is in the same league as similar printers by other manufacturers. A 20 page text document took about three and a half minutes to print in Normal mode and a ten page document of mixed text and graphics took four minutes.

The print quality of the Canon PIXMA iP2702 was somewhat mixed. Text was very satisfying and was dark and easy to read. Graphics were easy to read but the colour was disappointingly washed out and dull. The printer really fell down when it came to photos. These were dull and slightly foggy.

The Canon PIXMA iP2702 may be worth considering depending on what you are looking for. At £45 it is undeniably cheap, it is simple to work with, is not very large, produces very good mono prints and has some decent software. However it is also expensive to run because of the colour cartridge, is not very good at colour printing and gives the impression of not being that well built.

HP Laserjet P1505 Review

alanx13 — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:27:17 +0000

Undercutting all of the small laser printers recently tested, the HP Laserjet P1505, with a price tag under £90 is aimed at the budget end of the laser market. Lacking an LCD screen, it makes do with buttons and coded lights and although it boasts a USB2.0 port, there is no Ethernet port for multi-user printing. If network printing is a high priority, HP does offer the P1505n model that incorporates an Ethernet port, but the price rises by an unreasonable £50.
Design
The P1505 doesn’t look much, especially compared to the attractive Samsung ML-1630 and it is obvious that HP has had to cut many corners to get down to this price point. Both the input and output trays are not of the usual HP standard, with the input guides being particularly small and difficult to move. The control panel, consisting of buttons and lights can be very confusing to interpret and the lack of any printed documentation to consult is frustrating. An on screen help system is employed but personally I would prefer referencing a hard copy.
Cartridges
The printer is supplied with a starter cartridge with a limited capacity of 1,000 pages, so it will not be long before you are forced to buy a replacement. The only cartridge suitable for this printer is the HP CB436a with a capacity of 2,000 pages and is not intended for heavy-duty use. This cartridge type is currently only used in this machine and two multifunction printers and costs a hefty £42. This yields a cost per page of over 2p, so it is not particularly economical. Compatible toner cartridges have not reached the market yet, so you cannot rely on this avenue for cost savings.
Performance
Unfortunately there was also evidence of cost cutting in the print tests. Plain text is handled fairly well given the likely workload, HP’s new spherical toner delivering crisp characters, however graphic performance isn’t up to par. Gradients were afflicted by plenty of banding and the maximum resolution of 600×600 dpi is half of that available from some other budget printers, like the Brother HL-5240. If print quality is disappointing, the same cannot be said for print speed. This printer hit 22ppm in tests that included both text and graphics, a result that is excellent for a budget laser printer and is faster than many more expensive printers.
If you are just after a fast affordable mono laser printer for your home office, at less than £90 the HP Laserjet P1505 may just fit the bill. But if you require a little more in the way of usable features or better quality output, you would be well advised to increase the budget slightly and look one division up, at the likes of the Brother HL-5240.

Canon Pixma iP2600

alanx13 — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:05:06 +0000

The Canon Pixma iP2600 is a budget, no frills inkjet photo printer. Retailing for under £30 and replacing the Pixma iP1800, this is an entry level, basic printer with few features. As such it lacks such items as a PictBridge port and a memory card slot, but is a sleek design and produces bold, crisp prints at competitive print speeds.

Design
Canon has put a lot of thought into the design of the Pixma iP2600, the small exterior, 5.6×17.4×10 inches, is very sleek and in glossy black with a slightly mirrored finish is a great addition to your desktop. No boring grey plastic shell for this neat printer. The only downside to this finish is the propensity for the shiny body to retain fingerprints and attract dust. However if kept clean blends in nicely with other modern desktop peripherals. A basic control panel is situated on top of the printer, with two buttons; one a paper feed button and the other a duel power and error-warning button. The back of the printer is home to the USB port and power input socket. As with all manufacturers, Canon does not include a USB cable with the printer, so this will be an additional expense. With no PictBridge or memory card slot you are forced to download images to your PC and print from there, but this is to be expected from a printer in this price range.

Cartridge supplies
Only two cartridges are required in the Pixma iP2600, a black ink cartridge and a three-colour cartridge. There are two capacities of each available, the standard black cartridge, PG37 has 11ml of ink and the higher capacity PG40 has 16ml. The standard colour cartridge, CL38 contains a total of 9ml of ink, 3ml of each cyan, magenta and yellow, whilst the higher capacity CL41 contains a total 12ml of ink, 4ml of each colour. With the PG40 costing less than £14 and the CL41 less than £17, these cartridges represent the best value for use in this printer.

Performance
In speed tests the Pixma iP2600 performed very well. It managed to produce 5.68 pages per minute of black text, which compares well with both the HP DeskJet D4260 and the Lexmark Z845, that are both more expensive printers. The canon also performed well in quality tests, the characters formed were precise with crisp edges and created no blurred areas, in colour graphics tests most documents came out with solid colours and nice even distribution of colour. The only slight area of concern was in portions where gradual colour gradients occurred but these imperfections were barely noticeable to the bare eye and only a perfectionist could grumble.
4×6 photos printed on Canons semi-gloss paper were also impressive. They were not perfect but were well balanced and even, a difficult job for a budget printer.

So with solid printing performance at relatively quick output speeds and acceptable photo prints, the Pixma iP2600 is an affordable choice and is a printer that performs well above its weight, making it probably the best budget buy under £50.

Inkjet page yields.

alanx13 — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:52:00 +0000

As more printer manufacturers shy away from giving details of how many ml’s of ink is contained in an inkjet cartridge it has become more important to understand page yields and how they are measured.

Page yield is the total number of pages that you can print with a given ink cartridge. Traditionally each printer manufacturer would run their own differing tests to determine page yields and customers ran the risk of comparing “apples to oranges” when determining the printer page yields from different manufacturers.

Now, fortunately printer manufacturers work with the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and have developed a set of industry standard tests to measure inkjet cartridge page yields.

What is ISO?

ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 156 countries, on the basis of one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system.

ISO is a non-governmental organization: its members are not delegations of national governments, as they are in the United Nations. Rather, ISO occupies a special position between the public and private sectors. Some of its member institutes are part of the governmental structure of their countries, or are mandated by their governments, while others represent national partnerships of private-sector industry associations.

Therefore, ISO is able to act as a bridging organization in which consensus can be reached on solutions that meet both the requirements of business and the broader needs of society, such as the needs of stakeholder groups like consumers and users.

These tests consist of printing a standard set of five pages, continuously, until the ink cartridge has reached the end of its life. This continuous method of testing is obviously less time consuming and expensive for the manufacturers to perform and whilst may allow an “apples to apples” comparison, bears little resemblence to real life situations.

The five pages chosen for example are unlikely to be replicated in actual day to day print situations and industry experts estimate that ink printer users only print a few pages at a time and that hours, if not days can pass before an other print job is requisitioned. This type of start/stop printing can dramatically reduce the page yield obtained from a cartridge. Inkjet printers use some ink to keep the printhead nozzles clear to allow the ink to flow smoothly and most printers perform a maintenance operation on start up which also depletes the volume of ink in the cartridge.

Some page tests are measured on a page coverage of only 5% for black print, the standard letter test, and areas of solid black or areas of greyscale on the page will have an effect.

Canon are now alone amongst the major printer manufacturers to continue to display the volume of ink contained in their cartridges and it is unlikely they will continue to do so if their competitors have abandoned the practice. HP and Epson until recently had this information available, however on the latest HP packaging only a page yield figure is given and the latest Epson packaging contains no information at all to aid the consumer in a choice. Lexmark have had a tradition of vagueness when it comes to page yield information on packaging and they have reached new levels of ambiguity with their latest XL cartridges, stating “2x More pages” and in the small print telling you that the cartridge will last twice as long as another Lexmark model.

It is true that different printer models would yield differing page yields with the same volume of ink, but it is clear this latest trend sheds little more light on the thorny question of how long am ink cartridge should last.