Canon i-SENSYS LBP3250 Toner Review

Canon's i-SENSYS LBP3250 mono laser printer is a small and thoughtfully made machine. Its specification is humble - an individual USB port, diminished noise levels in addition to 8,000 page maximum monthly duty cycle turn it into a fine personal laser printer designed for house or office use. We were pleased by small details like a flap to supply less difficult access to the printer's recessed USB port, that spared us the usual procedure for fumbling blindly to try to get the cable in to place. We likewise enjoyed its smooth design and style, which has a hinged dust cover to keep the end result clean whenever not being used. In case you commence printing with the cover shut, pages can still appear via a narrow slit within the cover. The input tray folds right out of the front of the device.

It's not hard to setup and install, having a basic driver and merely one consumable - a black toner cartridge which has an integrated photoconductor drum. We were likewise happy to discover that the LBP3250 has a 1,000 page starter cartridge. Replacement 2,000 page 1871B002AA cartridges will cost you £49 each. This makes a page cost of 2.5p. Whilst this is not substantially over the normal price of a mono page from the majority of similarly priced laser as well as inkjet printers, it does not stand out in comparison to the the print costs of other, cheaper, mono lasers.

The printer's Total Cost of Ownership likewise does not impress. If you are a small user, printing 100 pages a month for a total of 3,600 over three years, you can expect to pay out £198 through that period of time. This goes up to £590 with regards to medium users printing 21,000 pages over the identical three-year period.

Print rates of speed happen to be some of the fastest we have observed out of a lightweight mono laser machine, at 21.7ppm in the mono text examination along with 20.6ppm for our heavily illustrated greyscale business documents. Standard quality text along with business illustrations were found to be sharp, dark and also solid.

While the printer includes a fixed native resolution of 600x600dpi, there are actually three different quality options: Standard, Text/Lines as well as Web Pages, which use resolution enhancement to produce a powerful resolution up to 2,400x600dpi. Text/Lines mode is intended to smooth out jagged edges whenever generating mono prints of coloured text and line drawings.

The Web Pages setting helps to make sure best quality while printing graphics-heavy content like web pages, pictures or perhaps illustrated documents. We employed the latter together with the Canon i-SENSYS LBP3250 toner cartridge for the purpose of our picture printing tests. This created simply no change to the pace at which our photographic images printed - 16 seconds for six pictures upon three sheets of A4 - yet made some noticeable enhancements to their quality through smoothing out regions which appeared grainy with Standard quality setting.

The LBP3250 is very well designed, with great print quality, as well as remarkably fast print rates with regards to this type of compact device. Nevertheless, unless its smooth style and fast printing specifically grab you, its running expenses are not sufficiently good to overcome the competitors. If you're a small user with a modest initial budget, Epson's Aculaser M1200 costs a bit less than half the cost to purchase, whilst customers with large printing demands should look at possibly Samsung's SCX-4600 mono laser MFP or perhaps ML-2525 single-function model.

Canon i-SENSYS LBP3250 cartridges are to be found here.

Theodore Beach is a member of the Cartridge Concept team which specialises in printer cartridges.