Product Reviews

Canon's BJC 2100, priced at £56, is certainly at the cheap end of the market. Shame my review isn't all that cheerful.

Design

Using the USB connection, the BJC is pretty much plug'n'play. Its driver is standard Canon fodder, which means it shields the user from all the numbers, and instead gives them a choice of (supposedly) pre-optimised settings for various different document types. Loading paper into the top-mounted feeder is simplicity itself, and there's only one button to bother with - a power switch. It's not bad looking, in a small sort of way, but it's quite noisy when it

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Print Quality

There's absolutely nothing to choose between this and the Apollo in photographic modes - they're both dire. Dithering is pathetic - very ordered and patterned, a throwback to the mid-nineties. Colour depth, on the other hand, is very good. Skin tones are accurately reproduced - provided that you squint so that you don't see the dots. Text output in our speed test is awful, too - overly grey, with very obvious stepping and huge chunks of white space inside characters. Horrible.

Performance

You could almost forgive poor print quality if the results were shot out of the printer fast. Unfortunately the BJC-2100 is a bit of a slouch, especially in the low-res tests, recording the slowest text-only score of this month's bunch. At just over 10 minutes it's also pretty near the bottom of the pile for photo-printing speed. Pretty poor when you take into account its relatively low resolution.

Overall

Even at its lowly price, there's nothing much to recommend this Canon. Buying it is a real false economy when you consider the running costs: at 11p per colour page, the BJC-2100 is joint most expensive with the Apollo. Avoid.