Canon I-SENSYS LBP5050 Review

This is the USB-only printer in Canon’s i-SENSYS LBP5050 color laser range, which we checked out at the time it originally was released in 2008. All the printers based around the LBP5050 components have come down in both price and running expenses since their original launch, which makes the range worthy of revisiting.

At £155, the LBP5050 will cost you little more than a correspondingly specified mono laser, so that it is a right solution concerning users on a tight budget. It’s print costs are not quite so inexpensive, at 10.1p per page of combined black and color but mono expenses are a sensible 1.6p.

It’s easy to set up, and the installer quickly recognized the printer on the network, although we needed to select it as our default printer manually. Four shallow toner cartridges inhabit a drawer that runs from behind a door in front of the printer. It’s an attractive design, but space is restricted; therefore, there’s no alternative of larger yield cartridges. Capacity is limited within the paper tray, also, which has sufficient room for 150 sheets. There is also a single-sheet feed at the front end for printing on envelopes as well as thicker paper stock, right up to 230gsm.

The LBP5050 is a single-pass model thus, even though the 9.8ppm mono print speed is actually not very good at best, the LBP5050 managed to print our combined colour document at a sharp 7ppm – speedier than any similarly priced colour laser model we have examined.

Both standard paper as well as envelopes printed without having any severe curling. Mono text, color, and also greyscale pictures were all produced to a very high standard, and even tiny 5pt text was legible. Regions of bold color were glossy as well as well defined, also though red shades were too pronounced. This was easy to fix utilizing the driver’s color adjustment settings, which feature a straightforward click-and-drag color-correction tool.

Every Canon i-SENSYS LBP5050 Toner cartridge features its incorporated print head; thus, there are not any hidden expenses. All you’ve got to buy are the toner cartridges. This gives the LBP5050 a surprisingly small Total Cost of Ownership when it comes to even heavy use ( around 2,000 mono and 1,000 color pages monthly for three years). The printer’ s maximum monthly duty cycle of 25,000 pages suggests that it should undoubtedly be in a position to handle the strain of a couple of thousand pages regularly.

On the other hand, it isn’t as good a deal concerning light users as Samsung’s CLP-315w, although. It fails to possess network support, and we, to some degree, preferred the standard of Samsung’s graphics prints. We, at the same time, have reservations about the LBP5050’s monoprint speeds. Nevertheless, it is really an exceptional cheap colour laser. Like most, printing in colour is often an expensive prospect, however we were impressed by its quick colour speeds and also low ownership costs.