A Darn Good Little Printer for the Price

Canon BJC-4400

by Charlie Morris

The Canon BJC-4400 is an excellent product for what it is. What it is is a general-purpose color printer with a rock-bottom price tag. It's not designed for demanding production environments or print-shop results, but you can't fail to be impressed with the level of quality for the price.
February 15, 1999

Let me clue you in right off the bat - the quality you get depends on using the right paper. If you use regular paper in this thing, the results are awful. The colors run, the paper wrinkles, text isn't sharp, and the whole thing just looks terrible. But fill 'er up with a good inkjet-specific paper and the quality is a whole lot better. Use a premium coated paper, and the quality is very good. Canon and Polaroid both make some very good paper of this kind. That's the main drawback - to get the really good results, you have to use special paper, which is heavy, and slick on one side. It can only be printed on one side, and it's too stiff to fold, so it's not suitable for everything. But for those of us old enough to remember dot-matrix printers, it looks pretty darn good for $150. Of course, the good paper is expensive, and the little lady goes through ink cartridges pretty quickly, too. There are a few other tradeoffs, too. The Canon BJC-4400 is slow, and the tray doesn't hold much paper. When using thicker papers, you end up having to feed the sheets through one at a time, as it grabs two of the pricey leaves instead of one more often than not. Text quality is good but not great. If you really want crisp, beautiful text, your best bet is still a black-and-white laser printer. There are two different cartridges available, the regular color/black-and-white cartridge and a special "photo" cartridge. Canon likes to throw around the word "photorealistic," which is of course wild hyperbole applied to any consumer printer. If you start with a good-quality image, and use the "photo" cartridge and special "photo" paper, you can get an attractive print, but it's nothing that will put the local photo shop out of business any time soon. There's also an optional scanning cartridge, which can be put in place of the ink cartridge, allowing the Canon BJC-4400 to double as a cheap scanner. She can handle paper from 17 to 30 weight, up to legal size, as well as envelopes, stickers, transparencies and even t-shirt transfers. Resolution is 720 x 360 dpi. The Canon BJC-4400 is comparable to other printers in its class, made by Lexmark, Epson and Hewlett-Packard among others. It's a good little light-duty printer, and if you take the time to choose the right paper for the right job, it should yield acceptable results for everyday home or business use.