Canon Can't (Canon BJC 6200)

Member Name: izzywizzy

Product:	Canon BJC 6200
Date:	07/12/03 (610 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap to run, Good paper handling, Was cheap to buy

Disadvantages: Awful software, USB lead didn't work properly, Unreliable (lasted less than 2 years)

We bought this Canon BJC-6200 colour bubblejet printer to replace a black and white Canon printer in our small office. We had been through four different black and white inkjet printers, and liked the last colour inkjet (a BJC620), which is why we chose to purchase another Canon printer.

COST & SEPARATE INK TANKS
The main reason for choosing this particular model was the cost. We particularly wanted a printer with separate colour ink tanks. The BJC-6200 has separate tanks for black, cyan, magenta and yellow ink.

Having separate ink tanks reduces your running costs considerably, since you only need to replace each colour one at a time as it runs out. At the time of purchase (about 2 years ago) this was the cheapest model with separate ink tanks available, and cost a little under £100.

I have been unable to find this model on sale currently, and there is no longer any information on Canon's website.

RUNNING COSTS
The printer is quite economical. Replacement Canon ink tanks can be found for £6.99 (Viking Direct) and last for a couple of months even with heavy office use and quite a lot of colour printing. The black ink cartridge is more expensive at £8.79, but is double the capacity of the colour cartridges. The cartridges seem to last well, even with the fairly high level of colour printing we perform. I probably have to change one cartridge per month.

SOFTWARE
The Canon print software is easy to install, and quite suitable for home use. However, for office use the software is irritating. There are frequent low ink reminders well before the tanks run dry, and lots of popups that quite frankly would be better popped down, but no option to turn them off. My machine crashed on a regular basis if I had a couple of different programs open and then tried to print something. Our IT expert somehow managed to disable the software interface, and for that I have been very grateful, but this might not be an option for
an inexperienced computer user.

PRINT QUALITY
The print quality has been not bad, but not nearly as good as the BJC-620 (which we had for about 5 years before it sadly died two months ago) or our recently acquired Epson Stylus C64. The print quality has slowly deteriorated and I am about to change to a new printer because the machine is no longer printing reliable colours. The colours are starting to bleed, so that I sometimes have excess cyan or excess yellow ink, causing yucky brown and green colours on our artwork instead of the expected crisp reds and blues. I now use this machine only for printing invoices, and it will shortly be replaced by another Epson.

digression...THE CANON BJC-620
While I'm on the subject, please don't confuse this machine with the older BJC-620. The BJC-620 had a continuing problem with paper handling which Canon sorted out with the BJC-6200, but in the process, they lost the print quality and managed to come up with the worst printer software I have ever seen. I also have a continuing problem with the BJC-6200's USB lead that Canon support have been unable to sort out.

USES
We have used our Canon BJC-6200 for printing: general letters, address labels, CD labels, CD inserts, floppy disk labels, T-shirt transfers, business cards, transparencies and posters with a great deal of success. The photo quality is not impressive, and the print quality eaves a lot to be desired, but it was passable (until our recent problems with bleeding ink cartridges).

REPLACING INKS
Replacing ink is very straightforward. full instructions are given in the manual. The black ink tank is larger than the rest which is sensible since you use more black ink than coloured ink.

SHEET FEEDER
The sheet feeder holds up to 100 sheets of paper or 10 envelopes.

USER MANUAL
Informative and full of helpful pictures.

PAPER HANDLING
Paper handling has been excellent overall.
The only problem is that the machine will occasionally take two sheets of paper.

CANON HELP LINE
Not much help really. They couldn't suggest any way to turn off the software interface even though our IT expert eventually found a way. One of our reasons for buying this machine was that it has a USB connection (at the time this was a relatively new feature, although USB connection has since become the standard). Unfortunately, the BJC6200 never worked properly with the USB lead and we had to resort to an old-fashioned parallel printer lead. We tried Canon's help line on a number of occasions, but they could offer no explanations.

PRINT SPEED
Slow. At high quality resolutions pages can take over a minute to print.

RELIABILITY
Initially, after the printer lead was swapped to a parallel, and we disabled Canon's awful software, the printer worked satisfactorily for about twelve months. Recently, the print quality has deteriorated significantly and the ink colours are bleeding into each other. I am
looking forward to the purchase of a second Epson colour inkjet as a replacement for this awful machine.

OVERALL
If you get the chance to pick up one of these printers cheap, perhaps second-hand, then don't. You could pick up an Epson C64 for less than £60 and even though its running costs are higher than those of the Canon, the Canon just ain't worth the hassle. Looking at the Canon printers in a large PC chain supersore recently, they looked and felt tacky and plasticky. A few years ago, Canon had a reputation for quality and reliability. They were my printer manufacturer of choice.

Canon - you need a serious rethink.

WEBSITE
Canon's official website is

http://www.canon.co.uk

There does not appear to be a link to a page for the Canon BJC-6200.

There is a list of error codes here:

http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/canon/bj/bjc6200.h tm

Summary: