With colour laser printers starting at under £200, there has to be something different about a machine costing nearly £800 including VAT. The most obviously different spec in the i-SENSYS LBP5360 is its print speed, rated at 21ppm for both black and colour prints. Other specs that catch the eye are a first-page-out time of 10 seconds and toner capacities of 6,000 pages each.

This is a substantial printer, sitting high off the desk, with its in-line laser engine working vertically, so paper feeding from the 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom passes up the machine and feeds out to its top surface. There's a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray which folds down from the front, too. At the top of the front panel is a neat set of controls, with a single-line, backlit LCD display.

As standard, the i-SENSYS LBP5360 can be run through USB 2, parallel or Ethernet connections and it supports duplex printing, so you can save on paper by printing documents on both sides of each sheet. Software supplied with the printer includes a driver that supports useful print features such as watermarks and overprints.

The printer took 26 seconds to complete a five-page black test print, giving it a print speed of 11.5ppm. Surprisingly, it was quicker printing a mixed text and colour graphics page, where it completed a five-page run in 21 seconds, at just over 14ppm. Printing duplex, the machine managed 15 sides per minute, nearly 75 percent of its rated speed. Although this may not sound good, it's actually quite impressive given that all printer manufacturers insist on quoting print speeds that don't include processing time or warm-up.

We saw the first page out of this printer in 15 seconds, which is also good in comparison with its main competitors, though 50 percent longer than the claimed time. It has a very short warm-up and, because each of the four colours has its own photoconductor drum, the page image is laid down progressively as the paper passes through; an efficient technique.

Print quality is very good for a business laser with text coming through sharp, well-defined and intensely black, and colour graphics looking true to the screen image. Even photographs, not normally a strong suit for colour lasers, look more natural from this printer and less like 1930s retouched seaside postcards than from some of the i-SENSYS's rivals.

With four separate drum and toner cartridges to maintain, you might think it would be a costly printer to run. In fact, though, it works out at around 1.7p for a black page and 6.5p for a colour one, which is at the cheaper end of the spectrum. Each cartridge is good for 6,000 pages, too, so you won't be forever maintaining it, even if it's heavily used.

Verdict
There aren't many reasons to poke a finger at the i-SENSYS LBP5360, other than to indicate you've got a good colour laser printer. It prints quickly, at high quality and with below average running costs, plus it's easy to maintain and even fairly quiet. The purchase price is quite high, but if you sit it in the middle of a workgroup it should give a good many days' work without complaint.

Company: Canon

Contact: 0800 787787

Tags: printer laser printer printing universal serial bus duplex printing liquid crystal display ethernet hardware