Canon LaserShot LBP-5000 Colour Laser Printer Review

Get more than what your money is worth with the all-new color laser printer from Canon. Barely priced £200, it’s worth taking a throne in homes or offices. Bid unnecessary worries goodbye with it’s more cost-efficient and maintenance-friendly features, including its all-in-one color cartridges.

Designed in simplicity’s true-blue definition, you might probably mistake this 8ppm printer as a draining board dishwasher for its size. It operates this way: as the paper gets in from the 250-sheet bottom paper tray, it proceeds to glide through the four integral toner s and drum cartridges, coming out at the top, where the top cover waits to flip open and support it.

You can boost Canon Lasershot LBP-5000 color laser printer by adding another paper tray beneath, and/or an Ethernet card to work with its USB 2.0 connection in perking up its network functionality. With this add on, you can comfortably print large amounts of work without having to stop and replace new printing sheets.

At its face are eight LEDs of a control panel to show where low toner, paper, paper jam and power alerts. Having no LCD display, the printer driver controls the vivid error alerts. The driver alerts should be enough to give you a hint on what the error could be.

To run it, start off by pulling the front cover open and putting in the four drum and toner cartridges. Match the color-coded strips on each of the cartridges with those on the slots. Close the front cover to put the drum covers back to a position where they could touch the paper as it glides through.

It allows for many pages a sheet, watermarks and various color settings for different files. Opt to put a binding margin on the left and top of the pages, though, because it can neither print in duplex nor facilitate manual duplexing.

Canon claims that its printing rate is 8ppm. But its real printing speed is just a little over 5ppm, which we determined upon testing and finding out that it can only print five pages in about 55 seconds. As an in-line machine, it uses no drum or belt to get in between the laser engines and the paper. Therefore, you’d get a color-printing job done just as fast as you would in printing a plain black page.

Towering in print quality, it prints very well-defined texts with clean character and line edges and not a shadow of toner splatter.

Despite reproducible slight miss-registrations in the middle of colored and text overlays, business graphics prints are of good quality.

Picture prints come out looking natural, without the over-emphasis of primary colors like what other color lasers do. With its shadow detail and reproduction quality, forget the traces of the dot pattern from its 600dpi engine.

As for its working noise, the sound is quite intense but it isn’t too harsh to be irritating. Better believe Canon in their claim that the printer works at 60dBA.

The simplicity of its mechanisms marked by the absence of transfer belts leaves you to worry about no other cost but the cartridges’. Their photoconductive drums and toners make LBP-5000 sets it apart from other printers using low-capacity cartridges.

How much money could it save? Let’s compute. We have a 42-pound 2500-sheet color cartridge and four cartridges producing 2000 sheets at 5% cover worth £44 each. Then, a page would cost 2.16p in black and 8.86p in colour. It doesn’t differ much from other printers we’ve reviewed recently, like Samsung’s CLP-300, which prints at a cost of 2.8p for black and 10.41p for color.

LaserShot LBP-5000 is a good buy for a general-use colour laser printer. With this printer, you don’t have to worry about mundane problems as its basal design saves maintenance troubles such as spare part replacements. This means that there will be little room for errors. While it is cost-efficient, its outputs are of high quality, even for tricky prints. Scouting for an inexpensive printer? You may want to give this one a try.