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| Canon BJC-2100 Color Bubble Jet Printer (Printers) |
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Hardware Reviews January 2001 • Vol.9 Issue 1 Page(s) 36 in print issue |
Canon BJC-2100 Color Bubble Jet Printer (Printers) | ||
 One of the best things about the $99 BJC-2100 from Canon is that the company offers a $50 rebate on it. As a $49 printer, the BJC-2100 is a steal. It offers very good text at its 720 x 360 dpi default resolution and passable photos on photographic paper. However, as the $50 discount is a rebate and not an official price reduction, we're forced to treat the BJC-2100 as a $99 printer, which puts it up against some serious competitors such as Epson's Stylus Color 670 and Lexmark's Z32 Color Jetprinter. This low-cost Canon gave us some fair speeds: 2.40ppm (pages per minute) in our 10-page, draft-quality text test (but we didn't like the results), 1ppm in our PowerPoint presentation, and 0.7ppm for our Word document with both text and color graphics. Its photographs printed at 0.10ppm on both normal and photographic paper. The BJC-2100 edges out the Epson 670 in text sharpness and top speed, but the 670 leaves it behind in every other competition. Lexmark's Z32 only gives up photo printing speed to the Canon. Distinct banding and eye-twisting dithering patterns plague the Canon's color graphics in Word and PowerPoint. However, if all you need is a cheap printer for the occasional letter or photograph, the BJC-2100 could be just the thing. Canon backs the BJC-2100 with a one-year warranty. It's compatible with Win95/98/NT4/2000 and Mac OS 8.1 and higher. Both the black and color ink tanks ($9 and $22, respectively) fit inside a single printhead. The printhead, which comes as a $53 replacement assembly with tanks included, won't need to be replaced as often as the tanks themselves. Working backward from Canon's provided costs per page, we estimate the number of prints you'll get from the black tank at 225 and 137 pages from the color tank. This means that the BJC-2100 should be a very cost-effective text printer, but any color documents won't be cheap. We've read too many Action Editor letters about broken promises to endorse any rebate offer, although Canon is pretty trustworthy. All we can say is that the BJC-2100 is a good deal at $49. by Marty Sems
$99 Canon (800) 423-2366 (714) 438-3000 http://www.ccsi.canon.com
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