What do you want from a colour laser printer in a small workgroup? [img 77690 /] Top of the list are probably print quality, low total cost of ownership (TCO) and speed. Lower down are things like size and expandability.
Canon is a stalwart of the multifunction printer market and last year we looked at the i-Sensys MF4690PL. Once again, with the i-SENSYS LBP7200Cdn Canon has generally got its priorities right.
This is a chunky machine, simply styled in white and light grey, with a rounded top, front edge and clearly delineated joins between its various panels. Starting from the top and working down, the control panel, which sits next to a deep-set output tray set into the printer's top surface, has just nine indicators and a single button, for cancelling a print job.
This is probably all you need, as the array includes indicators for paper jam, out of paper and one each for the four print cartridges, but they are all mounted flush with the top of the machine, so when they’re flashing they aren't immediately obvious, unless you're standing over it. Some of Canon's competitors have taken to putting warning indicators on raised parts of the top cover, so they can be seen from across an office.
A blue handle on the front panel pulls open a multi-purpose tray, which can take up to 50 sheets and extra supports slide out and flip over, so you can load special media. Below that is a 250-sheet plain paper tray, which even on a colour laser seems to us to be too low a capacity. Any printer intended to be shared between several people should, we feel, be able to take 400 to 500 sheets at a go. With 500 sheets, you can load a ream at a time from a fresh pack and forget about it, possibly for a week or two.
Pull down the whole of the front cover and you can get at the slide-out tray’ which holds the four consumables. Each of these is a combined drum and toner cartridge and they are rated at 2,900 pages for each of the colours and 3,400 pages for black. You have to contend with the usual cheapskate practice of ‘starter’ cartridges in the box, in Canon's case rated at 1,200 and 1,400 pages. The yields of the mainstream versions should help keep TCO down and fitting new consumables is very straightforward.
Software set up involves little more than installing drivers. Canon provides for Windows 2000, XP and Vista, and OSX 10.4.1 and above. No Linux support is detailed.[pb/]
Canon rates the i-SENSYS LBP7200Cdn at 20ppm for both black and colour print and while we couldn't match this figure, we did get quite close with our 20 page, black text print, which completed in 1:17, a speed of nearly 16ppm. Our five-page black text and colour graphics document took exactly 30 seconds, or 10ppm and when we repeated the 20-page test with the machine’s internal duplexer engaged, the speed dropped to 8.6 sides per minute. Even though this is a bit slower than advertised, these speeds are still adequate for the market the printer’s being sold into.
This isn't a particularly quiet printer and we measured peak noise levels of 60dBA, when it was feeding paper. In typical office use, though, we wouldn't expect it to cause anybody much irritation.
Print quality from Canon machines has always been good – it's not for nothing that HP has used its laser engines for years. Black text is solid and well-shaped, even though the default resolution is a fairly standard 600dpi. It's neither over thick nor spidery and is ideal for internal documents and for external correspondence and presentations.
Colour is also well reproduced, with vivid, bright business graphics suffering little of the dither patterns some colour engines have to use to produce shades. Black text registration over colour is excellent and there's no sign of white-space haloing around characters.
Finally, the machine even reproduces colour photos with some degree of naturality. So often, colour photos produced by colour lasers veer towards the limited, bright hues needed for graphs and charts. Here, while not in the inkjet class, colour images are more than passable.
Print costs are a bit distorted because, at the time of writing, the i-SENSYS LBP7200Cdn is very new and suggested retail prices are all that's available for costings. Canon consumables are usually quite well discounted, so these figures should be treated very much as maximums. We calculate the ISO black page cost to be 3.5p and the colour page cost to be 16p, both of which are high, with the colour page cost being well above average.
Author: Simon Williams
Canon i-SENSYS: LBP7200Cdn review