Product Reviews

Colour laser printers continue to both fall in price and rise in functionality, and Canon's i-Sensys LBP5100 provides a lot for its modest asking price. Styled with a steeply raked, sloping front, and simple feed and output trays, it's quite a bulky machine coloured in cream and grey.

The main physical features are a single-sheet paper feed slot right at the bottom of the front panel and a fold-out output tray at the top. This tray needs to be opened up before you start printing, but Canon has cleverly designed it so that if you forget, paper exits from a slot at the back of the machine and ends up on the desk, rather than jamming the paper-feed mechanism. There's a 250-sheet paper tray below the single-sheet slot and a second 250-sheet tray is available as an option.

The control panel is more of a status panel, as it consists of eight LEDs to indicate such things as paper jam, and low toner and paper levels. However, there's no LCD display, which is presumably one of the design decisions forced onCanon by the printer's target price. Another restriction is the lack of a network connection. At the back there's just a single USB socket, although it's possible to add optional network connectivity.

Pull down the curved front cover of the LBP5100 and you can see the vertically mounted, in-line colour laser engine. Eachof the four combined drum and tonercartridges slots into the machine, andlocates positively, so setup and maintenance are very straightforward, and not beyond anybody of normal dexterity.

The driver software is a let-down with this printer. Although it provides the basics, and supports the machine's duplexing andother main printingfunctions, there's little support for consumables monitoring andit'sreally a question of watching the

ADVERTISEMENT

indicators on the front of the printer to check supply levels.

Canon quotes print speeds for the printer at 12 pages per minute (ppm) for black print and 10ppm for colour, and our tests showed that these figures are fair. A20-page black text print took under two minutes, including rasterising time, giving aspeed of just over 10ppm. A colour print of the same length ran out at 9.5ppm. A 15x 10cm photo print took less than 25 seconds.

All of these tests are in single-sided print mode, but the LBP5100 has a duplexer built in as standard. This is unusual in a comparatively inexpensive colour laser. WithCanon's inkjet printers, in which the company also offers duplex through much of its range, it's only just worth having, because it's so slow.

However, that's not true here. When we ran the same 20-side black text print in duplex mode, the printer completed it in only aquarter of a minute longer than the simplex time, around 8.5ppm. It does this by having two paper output slots, one forthe finished page and another for the pagewith its first side printed, before it's rolled back into the machine. Most duplex printers use the same slots for both, so youget some queuing.

The quality of both black and colour output from the printer is variable. Black text is clean and dense, with very little sign of toner spatter, but colours, while vivid and bright, aren't always accurate to the shades you see on screen. Although you can compensate for this by tweaking colour settings, blue shades in particular come outtoo dark by default. There are also noticeable halos around black text printed over coloured backgrounds, indicating less-than-perfect registration.

The only consumables in the printer are the combined drum and toner cartridges, which last for 2500 black pages and 2000 colour ones. Using Internet prices gives costs per page of 1.7p and 8.3p for black and colour pages, respectively. These costs are very reasonable for a colour laser printer in this price bracket and the black cost is particularly impressive.

Overall, this is an easy-to-use and cost-effective colour laser printer for the serious home user or for a small business, where colour can be used effectively to boost trade. While Canon could usefully revisit its Mac driver and support software, in other respects the i-Sensys LBP5100 offers a very good colour deal.