It's a printer, what more do you want? (Canon BJC 5100)

Member Name: jeremyf

Product:	Canon BJC 5100
Date:	17/06/00 (106 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Clean prints, up to 11x17 size paper, fast speed

Disadvantages: Software/driver bugs, color not super-high quality

This isn't the highest quality printer, nor is it a low quality printer. It prints your papers pretty well and that's about that!

I bought this printer because I needed a printer that was relatively cheap, worked, and would last me for years to come. I got it with a manufactuers' rebate so it turned out to be around $90 (£60).

The printer looks very nice and it's about the same size as a "stanard" printer. It's a little taller and wider than a standard printer, but not as deep.

Does it work? Well, yep, it usually prints. The quality is good enough for a black-and-white paper but (without extra high-color cartridges or expensive high-quality paper) the color is kind of lacking. You can obviously tell the picture you just printed came from an inkjet printer. It's not as bad as others I've used, but the quality is JUST low enough so that it looks like not something you'd want to use in something important.

I haven't used the accessories for high-quality color prints but I assume that it would look better and probably rather professional. However, if you can afford that, you might want to just go ahead and buy a more expensive printer designed for high quality color prints.

The Canon BJC-5100 has two great features you won't usually find in other printers, though.

First, it can print on larger-than-normal paper (11x17), which I haven't used, but it's almost unique to see that in a printer. It does this without making the printer any bigger than a normal printer; the slot for large paper is in the back and is hardly noticable if you don't use it.

Second, it advertises a 10ppm black print speed; that's a page printed every 6 seconds. That's extremely fast. It requires you to use two black ink cartridges to print at this speed, and I bought two for this purpose. I'd disagree with the figure. It seems to print faster than normal, but
not quite 10ppm. It seems more like a page printed every 8-15 seconds (depending on how much text). I'm not sure if this is because it doesn't detect my second cartridge, but I clearly followed the instructions!

After a while, I started to have some problems. It wouldn't print at all for a while, but then I realized there was a piece of garbage that got lodged in the sheet feed. Oops! Well, after that it seemed to print fine, but I found some problems later that I don't know were related to this or not.

First, it has a problem detecting the printer some of the time. I don't know why, but sometimes it says the printer is not ready. I fool around with the settings or restart and it seems to work fine.

Second, the color seemed to stop working, implying I was out of black ink. Color pages printed, but the black parts were omitted. I clearly have a second black cartridge in the 2nd cartridge slot, and I hadn't printed many pages so the black portion of the color cartridge couldn't have been out, unless maybe it was printing out of that instead of my black cartridge (which it shouldn't have).

Anyway, this is an above-average quality printer with some software/driver problems. It seems like an experiment from Canon that wasn't quite fully debugged; I'm sure in future versions I wouldn't have as many problems as I have.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still pretty happy with the printer despite the problems I've had; it's nothing that can't be worked around. If you don't want to work around anything though, you might wanna look elsewhere.

Summary: