Josey Puliyenthuruthel: Quick-gun printer

GIZMO GALLERY

If you have ever printed a 300-page thesis in triplicate, or bulky backgrounders before an office meeting, you know how frustrating a slow printer can be.

A high speed of printing and good quality prints are among the best values that laser printers bring to the table, but users have balked at it, given the hefty prices. That scenario, fortunately, as I said in a review of the Samsung ML-1710 this July, has changed.

Today, the marketplace has "" besides the ML-1710 "" other monochrome models like Hewlett Packard's LJ 1005 or Epson's EPL 6200L or "" if you travel abroad "" even the Lexmark E232 and the Brother HL-5130.

All these models are around Rs 15,000 or less, and bring with them the standard values one associates with laser printers. Today, we review the Canon LBP 3200, priced at under Rs 14,000 plus taxes.

When I ran it through a simple speed test, the Canon LBP 3200 printed four pages in just less than 15 seconds "" equivalent to 16-17 pages a minute, which is quite an excellent speed, although it is slower than its rated 18-pages-a-minute.

Pages with graphics on them printed at speeds of 13 to 15 pages a minute. (Remember this is a black and white printer.) In comparison, the Samsung ML-1710 printed at a speed of 12-13 pages a minute.

The Canon LBP3200 uses one cartridge for about 2,500 pages, which is an industry average; though Samsung claims the ML-1710 delivers 20 per cent more at about 3,000 pages.

The Canon LBP32000 is an easy machine to get started on. It took me less than five minutes to get it up and running (including installation of the software).

It works fairly silently and responds quickly. At the heart of this quick response, says Canon, is its CAPT (Canon Advanced Printing Technology) print driver and SCoA (Smart Compression Architecture) technology. Shorn of jargon, these optimise data flow to the printer, thereby easing overload on the printer's memory.

This reduces the amount of memory required in the printer and eliminates the common print processor bottleneck, feeding the print engine just fast enough to keep it running at full speed through its USB interface. The result is faster, continuous printing.

The quality of laser-printed sheets stands out when compared with inkjet prints and the Canon LBP 3200 delivers on that score as well, when printed at 600 dpi (dots per inch, a measure of print quality).

I got excellent quality test printouts: the serifs of the most complex fonts"" another standard test "" were neat and perfect even in small font sizes.

The impact was clear to the naked eye at font sizes of 14 and above. (As an aside: Canon invented the laser beam printer in the early 1980s and still earns royalties from having its technology patented to other printer makers.)

But the same quality was absent while printing at a lower print quality. At 300 dpi, which is the quality most admin managers like to set the printer at to save on ink, the quality fell drastically, especially while rendering graphics.

This can be fixed using the contrast controls in the printer software, but that can be a little painful because settings tend to reset to default between uses.

So then, the Canon LBP 3200 is going to be frowned at by the finance controller fraternity. Photos again were not well-rendered, though admittedly this printer is not meant for such use.

A quick word on the printer software: Canon is known for its technical soundness (remember those ads about how it is the world's second-highest holder of patents?) and its intuitively-designed user interfaces. It brings this pedigree to the LBP3200 software.

Clear diagrams on the control panel show how tweaking the quality settings will affect your prints. A well-thought out dialog box provides useful information during printing, for instance, how long it will to take to complete a print job, which is useful when the printer has multiple print jobs queued up.

To reduce the frequency of paper changes, the printer features a generous 250 page cassette, though irritatingly does not come with a page-level indicator.

As expected from a laser printer designed for professional small office, home office use, the Laser Shot LBP3200 accepts a wide range of print media, including A4 transparencies, envelopes, plain paper ranging from A4 to B5 sizes and postcards. Its small design makes it an ideal space-saving printer for small offices and homes.

Josey Puliyenthuruthel can be reached at

josey@vsnl.net