Portable Printers At The Right Price
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday August 14, 1995
CANON'S BJ-10 series of Little Squirts were the portable printers of choice for many travelling notebook users, but the company has gone one better, with its BJC-70 colour inkjet printer. To say the BJC-70 is a hit with road warriors, here and in the United States, is an understatement.
Not only is it one of the smallest and lightest colour inkjet printers, but the quality of its output is surprisingly good, being the first portable printer to offer true four-colour output. We tested one here for three weeks, and almost everyone who walked into the computers office marvelled at its tiny size, and then at its colour. The colour, of course, is not in the class of say, that produced by Epson's Stylus Color inkjets, but then the printer is a third of the size and costs only $645. Canon, claims it's the "ideal companion to a colour notebook for printing charts and graphs".
Canon spokesperson Lawrie Byrne views portable colour as a developing market.
"The concept of using colour has been changing dramatically. Now we've got colour printers that are affordable there'll be far more demand," he said. Canon is also targeting desk-based and home workers short on space.
The BJC-70 can be mains or battery powered. Canon claims it will print between 180 and 200 pages per charge - that figure is based on monochrome printing, but Byrne believes it wouldn't be dramatically different for pages incorporating colour graphics and line drawings.
Canon has also used the twin ink cartridge system - one three-colour and one black. Byrne claims that Canon has been able to cut the cost per page dramatically, with the BJC-70, by moving to a cartridge technology that does not require a change in print head with every cartridge change.
"The print head was a major part of the cost per page with previous models" said Byrne. It means the cost has fallen from about nine cents per monochrome page to about six cents.
The BJC-70 prints a maximum of four pages per minute, monochrome, and offers a resolution of 360 x 360 dots per inch. An enhanced 720 by 360 resolution is available when printing only in black.
Canon has two other colour printers under the $1,000 mark. The BJC-4000 Bubble Jet costs $795 and is designed as a low-end office or home printer. It is designed to minimise the compromises of text printing while also being able to print in colour.
The printer uses a cartridge swap-out system. For combined colour and true black printing, there's a four chamber cartridge - three colours and a black. But for faster, higher resolution text printing, there's a dedicated black ink cartridge that holds twice as much ink as Canon's previous BJ-200 cartridge.
Finally, the BJC 600 is Canon's higher quality four-colour desk printer aimed at full-time colour users. At $995 it just scrapes under the $1,000 mark. It uses four separate cartridges, one for each colour and one black.
© 1995 Sydney Morning Herald