Canon i-SENSYS LBP6000

An entry-level black & white laser printer designed for personal use, the i-Sensys LBP6000 stands out mainly for its compactness. It also claims to have low energy consumption, be simple to use, quiet and even inaudible in standby.

The same model is available in black as the LBP6000(B):

Hardware

Just like the Samsung ML-1660, this i-Sensys is no bigger than a shoebox. You'll be able to fit it in pretty much anywhere. However, such a small volume obviously can't house all that many features. Basically what we've got here is a model that prints in black and white and that's about it: no wi-fi, no double-sided and no card reader. It is however compatible with all the various operating systems in use.

At the front, two LEDs: (1) power (2) paper. Simple!

The paper warning light seems rather superfluous to us! Surely a stop printing button would be more pertinent.

You can configure the printer so that it goes into energy economy mode after a certain time without printing. Practical and simple to configure by following the procedure described on the installation CD.

The print functions cover all the bases: scaling of the printout, density setting for ink, page set-up, addition of background information (watermark), settings for data (name, date), adjustment of the image quality or grey levels, grouping of diverse data on the same page, print setting memory.
 

Speeds

In contrast to other sometimes misleading manufacturers, Canon invariably gives the same speeds as we record with our test documents. They give 18 pages per minute (ppm) for the LBP6000 and we scored it at 19 ppm. These speeds are comparable to similar models such as the Dell 1130 or the Samsung ML-1865. It's slightly faster than the the 16 ppm that the HP pro model, the LaserJet Pro M1212nf, gives.

Quality

The image quality is fine for simple text but for more complex prints or pro quality you will find this entry-level model limited. Nevertheless, in terms of its positioning and the target market (individuals, students), it does the job. On our graph, the printhead line is visible and this makes characters hard to read but the shading is nicely rendered, especially when you compare it to, say, the Dell 1130 on which the black background is a real block of colour (as a result the printhead line isn't as obvious and characters are sharper).

Energy consumption & Noise levels

Power draw in standby mode, a printer's habitual state, is 5 W, which is too high. When printing, it consumes 395 Watts, which is reasonable for a laser. The Samsung ML-1665 which draws 1 W in standby and 368 W when printing, shows lasers can go lower when it comes to energy efficiency. As announced in the spec, the printer is inaudible in standby but goes up to 52 dB(A) when printing.

Cost per page

Under the hood there's an all-in-one cartridge including the toner, drum and cleaning units. As is often the case with a space-saving design, there's only one format cartridge, as you can't fit larger capacity formats into small machines. The starter cartridge, again as is often the case, only comes half-full, which is to say it'll give 700 instead of the usual 1600 pages on the standard one.

ISO lifespan for text