Product Reviews

Mac users have been very poorly served by manufacturers of portable inkjet printers. Until the release of the Canon BJC-85 earlier this year there was nothing on the market that could be packed alongside an iBook or PowerBook for printing on the road. Now Canon has improved on the BJC-85 and come up with the BJC-55.

The BJC-55 looks much like its predecessor, but its case hides the most important improvement. While the BJC-85 offered a Nickel Metal Hydride battery as an option, the BJC-55 comes as standard with a built-in Lithium-ion battery. Canon claims the battery will print 100 pages between charges. The battery is recharged by plugging in the supplied universal power adaptor, which is designed to work anywhere in the world. Having such a small printer (it measures 302mm x 112.5mm x 50mm and weighs 900g) which runs on battery power means you can run off prints just about anywhere, making it a truly protable device.

If Macs still had infrared capability, you wouldn't even need a cable, as the BJC-55 can transmit and receive data via infrared. As it is, the printer connects to a Mac via the supplied USB cable.

Setting up the BJC-55 shouldn't

ADVERTISEMENT

cause any problems for anyone familiar with connecting peripherals. Those who seek help will be rewarded by an excellent Getting Started guide. Further help can be found in the excellent manual.

Supplied as standard are two cartridges: one for colour and one for monochrome printing. Optional cartridges are available for six-colour photo printing and scanning. The BJC-55 will print on everything from plain paper to glossy photo cards, including T-shirt transfers, but you'll need an optional feeder if you want to print more than one sheet at a time. This is unfortunate but, given that a sheet feeder would add substantially to the size of the printer, entirely understandable. Less forgivable is the difficulty we encountered feeding single sheets.

Print quality didn't inspire superlatives, but then we wouldn't expect it to in a portable device. The BJC-55 is no match for desktop photo inkjets when it comes to printing colour images and it lacks the speed of most full-sized inkjets. However, it produces perfectly acceptable text in less than 30 seconds for an A4 page, and makes a decent stab at colour photos. Likewise, the scanning cartridge is no substitute for a desktop flatbed, but is an excellent solution for making quick, cheap colour copies on the move. And, of course, it can be used in conjunction with an OCR package and a modem to email documents.

The BJC-55 isn't the cheapest inkjet on the market, nor is it the highest quality. But it's the smallest we've seen and will easily fit in a briefcase. The Lithium-ion battery makes it truly portable and the scanning option is a bonus. If it wasn't for the problematic paper feed mechanism the BJC-55 would be a must for anyone who deals with paper documents on the road.