Canon tops inkjet market
IN the portable printers' category, Canon and Hewlett Packard are two of the major brands on the market. Canon offers the widest range, with no less than five inkjet printers in the portable series.
''Canon's Bubble Jet series has the widest range of ink-based printers in the portable category. Our portables have cornered about 70 per cent of the market share,'' said Herbert Tang, marketing manager of Jardine Micro Systems, Canon's authorised agentin Hong Kong.
Top of the portable Bubble Jet range from Canon is the BJ230, a large format printer. This compact model can handle A3-size paper and offers 10 built-in fonts and laser quality output.
Featuring a built-in auto sheet feeder, it can work in high-speed mode at 500 characters per second (cps).
Also from Canon is the BJ200, which can produce professional-looking text and graphics with enhanced 360 dots per inch (dpi) resolution and 500 cps. It also offers an auto sheet feeder.
The BJ200 had 10 built-in type faces, including Script and could rival laser printers, though it came at a fraction of their size and price, Mr Tang said.
In the more compact model range, Canon offers the BJ20. It packs a laser-like printer performance in a compact affordable unit. It has sharp text and grey scale graphics that use a range of 10 built-in type faces, eight fronts, including Script in Epsonemulation mode, and two fonts in IBM mode.
Another model in the portable Bubble Jet range from Canon is BJ10ex. Small and compact, it claims to take portability a step further with advanced laser quality text and graphics.
In high quality mode, the 10ex can work at 83 cps speed, including various type faces. It has five fonts. It can take in B5 and A4-size paper. This light-weight model weighs about 1.8 kilos.
Also in this range is the Canon BJ10SX, which weighs 1.7 kilos. It has 360 dpi resolution, rivalling some laser printers.
There are a choice of five fonts in all, to produce good quality text and graphics. The paper sizes include A4 and B5.
In the portable range, the only other major rival to Canon comes from the Hewlett Packard stable, the HP DeskJet Portable.
''The DeskJet Portable printer offers laser-quality printing and performance similar to our top selling HP DeskJet 500, but in a more compact two-kilogram design. It uses the same water resistant black ink print cartridge,'' said Clement Yau, marketing manager of Hewlett Packard's computer products organisation.
''This is one portable printer which does not compromise on any of the functionality of a desktop printer, even though it is about half the size of a notebook PC,'' he said.
The DeskJet Portable is based on HP's thermal inkjet technology, and provides 300 dots per inch resolution while printing up to three pages per minute. It is also supported by all major DOS and Windows applications.
It has a wide range of built-in fonts, including portrait CG Times, Univers portrait, Courier in landscape and portrait and Letter Gothic in portrait and landscape. Windows 3.1 users can print scalable TrueType fonts as well.
The DeskJet also has an optional automatic cut-sheet paper feeder which can hold 50 sheets of paper or transparenices.
