Product Reviews

Canon's been pretty busy over the past few months, launching a gaggle of new inkjet printers into a market that never seems to sleep. For the budget buyer, there is the BJC-2000 (reviewed issue 96, page 34). It was a good printer for text on plain paper, but no master of the photographic image. Back in issue 95 (Reviews, page 50), we also examined the BJC-6000, a good all-rounder but not quite a match for Epson's Stylus Photo 750. Sitting between the two, in name and price, comes the Canon BJC-4400 Photo. Will this printer prove to be the undoing of its stiff opposition from Epson, Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark?

In build, the BJC-4400 Photo is like its smaller stable mate, the BJC-2000. It feels slightly flimsy, and is definitely no match for the bullet-proof HP DeskJet 690C (see issue 96, page 48). At least the rear-mounted sheet feeder can handle around a 100-sheet sheaf of A4 paper.

Externally, the printer looks pretty average. It has a very slightly curvaceous front face, and there's a simple control panel on the top with two buttons and one LED. One is for power, the other to resume printing, the 'wake-up' button. In use, both are pretty much superfluous, given that the BJC-4400 is fully Energy Star-compliant, going to sleep and waking up as commanded by the computer.

The BJC-4400 is packaged as an out-and-out photo

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printer. You don't get a standard black cartridge for text, or the CMYK colour cartridge designed for solid colour graphics (both are available as options); all you get is Canon's BC-22e cartridge, designed specifically for photo prints. While this cartridge lets you produce the most subtle of colours, it is very expensive to use. One cartridge, according to Canon, can manage only 50 pages of colour prints (at 7% coverage). And with the RRP of the cartridge at £30 (it costs nearly £20 on the street), this works out as 40p per page running costs!

So what kind of colour prints can you produce for this money? We threw some pretty challenging photos at the Canon to see what it would make of them. To ensure we got the best output, we used high-quality photo-type media. Initially, we were impressed by the Canon's output. However, when you place it next to prints from the Epson Stylus Photo 750, the latter is clearly the better machine, producing images that were both more realistically coloured and sharper - as well as being cheaper per page.

Now, admittedly, this is something of an unfair comparison - the Stylus Photo 750 is almost twice the price of the 4400 - but all those ink cartridge costs will add up in the long run. Stepping down the Epson range for a more similarly-pitched opponent, we felt the Canon's quality was much more on a par with Epson's Stylus Color 440 or 640 models.

Print times aren't bad. They vary according to resolution and size of output, but are always acceptable. Even a full A4 photorealistic image takes little over ten minutes. This is marginally quicker than the Epson Stylus Colour 440.

Considering this printer's price and quality, the Canon BJC-4400 appears a good way to produce your own photo prints at home. Its price is among the lowest we've seen. Quality isn't half bad, either. But with the photo inks so dear, anything more than occasional use isn't viable.