We bought this Canon BJC-620 colour inkjet printer to replace a black and white Canon printer in our small office. We had been through four different black and white inkjet printers, but really liked the last one (a BJ230), which is why we chose to purchase another Canon printer.
COST & SEPARATE INK TANKS
The main reason for choosing this particular model was the cost.
We particularly wanted a printer with separate colour ink tanks. The BJC-620 has separate tanks for black, cyan, magenta and yellow ink. Having separate ink tanks reduces your running costs considerably, since you only need to replace each colour one at a time as it runs out. At the time of purchase (about 5 years ago) this was the cheapest model with separate ink tanks
available, and cost a little under £200.
RUNNING COSTS
The printer is quite economical. Replacement Canon ink tanks can be found for £4.99 (Viking Direct) and last for a couple of months even with heavy office use and quite a lot of colour printing.
SOFTWARE
The Canon print software is easy to install, and quite suitable for home use. However, for office use the software is irritating. There are frequent low ink reminders well before the tanks run dry, and lots of popups that quite frankly would be better popped down, but no option to turn them off. My machine crashed on a regular basis if I had a couple of different programs open and then tried to print something. Our IT expert somehow managed to disable the software interface, and for that I have been very grateful, but this might not be an option for an inexperienced computer user.
PRINT QUALITY
The print quality has been excellent, and is consistently good 5 years after purchasing the machine, even with what must be 50,000 pages printed by now. The colours are good and very true to the original artwork. We still use this machine for printing all our CD covers because the print quality is so much better than our newer Canon BJC-6200.
digression...THE CANON BJC-6200
While I'm on the subject, please don't confuse this machine with the newer BJC-6200. For the BJC-6200, Canon sorted out the paper handling problem (see below), but lost the print quality and managed to come up with the worst printer software I have ever seen (yes, even worse than the BJC-620). I also have a continuing problem with the BJC-6200's USB lead that Canon support have been unable to sort out.
USES
We have used our Canon BJC-620 for printing: general letters, address labels, CD labels, CD inserts, floppy disk labels, T-shirt transfers, business cards, transparencies and posters with a great deal of success. It also makes a good job of printing pictures (although not up to photo quality).
REPLACING INKS
Replacing ink is very straightforward. full instructions are given in the manual. The black ink tank is larger than the rest which is sensible since you use more black ink than coloured ink.
SHEET FEEDER
The sheet feeder holds up to 100 sheets of paper or 10 envelopes.
USER MANUAL
Informative and full of helpful pictures.
PAPER HANDLING
My main bugbear with this printer is the truly awful paper handling, which has been getting progressively worse the longer we have had the machine. It is particularly bad at printing label sheets, with constant misfeeds. We managed to overcome the problem to some extent when we discovered that it helps to turn up the bottom right hand corner of the sheets (strange but true!).
CANON HELP LINE
Not much help really. They couldn't suggest any way to turn off the software interface even though our IT expert eventually found a way. They have been unable to solve a different problem with my other Canon printer (see above).
PRINT SPEED
Slow. At high quality resolutions pages can take over a minute to print.
RELIABILITY
Apart from the paper handling, the machine has been reliable and has churned out over 50,000 pages. So it's not all bad :-).
OVERALL
If you get the chance to pick up one of these printers cheap, perhaps second-hand, then by all means do so. The print quality surpasses many more expensive machines. Just check out the paper handling before you part with your money...
29.07.2003 22:25
Excellent op, you'll go far!I wasn't too impressed with the Canon that came with my PC and packed in after only 6mths. I now have an Epson and it's excellent. sylvie
29.07.2003 22:05
Lets hope you can get your problems sorted with your second printer. The BJC-620 sounds an excellent printer and cheap to run so I really would consider it. Nicely detailed review. Fionaxx
29.07.2003 20:47
a very informative op well done, maria x