Canon BJC-4300

VITAL STATS: 5-ppm monochrome, 2-ppm color ink jet; 720-by-360-dpi maximum resolution; 100 sheets input, 100 output. This new midrange model from Canon went straight to the top of our chart this month to become our new number-one color Best Buy. Cheaper (by $80) and faster at printing text (by about 35 percent) than its predecessor the BJC-4200, which was number three on our August chart, the BJC-4300 gives you the biggest bang for your buck of any color printer here. It--and not the new BJC-250--really should be Canon's entry-level system. At $199, the Canon BJC-4300 costs a mere $20 more than the BJC-250 but is built around a design that allows it to print true black and true four-color graphics.

The BJC-4300 does a charming job on color documents, printing edges clearly and revealing details that three-color printers would smother. We are also impressed by the BJC-4300's subtle and lifelike grayscales. Text quality? It's typical ink jet fare-not spectacular but certainly acceptable. Letters show slight jaggies, and tight corners start to fill in, but they are free of shadowing and spatter. Lines seem to be the printer's weak spot, with too much variation in weight.Like most other recent Canon printers, the BJC-4300's driver provides predefined settings for photos, graphics, and other document types, and a "set-up analyzer" that confirms your choices of paper type, image type, print quality, and so on. You can also customize and save driver configurations for special types of documents, such as sepia-toned photographs. The BJC-4300 also supports the $99 IS-22 Color Image Scanner cartridge that pops into the printhead's place, which turns your printer into a scanner. And, like most Canon printers, the BJC-4300's manual is an outstanding source of insight, with excellent explanations of how to get the best results from the driver and the many kinds of surfaces the printer supports, such as fabric, T-shirt transfers, glossy photo paper, banners, and specialty inks.We clocked the BJC-4300's text printing at 1.9 ppm--that's slower than most ink jets on our chart, but considerably faster than the BJC-4200. The BJC-4300 prints graphics at 3/10 page per minute, the same as most other ink jets.

The BJC-4300 comes with a fairly standard one-year limited warranty and a toll-free number, but once the year is up, each support call costs you a steep $24.95.