Canon i-Sensys LBP7018C

Part of the recent range of Canon i-Sensys printers, the LBP7018C is a colour laser printer designed for small companies and independent professionals. You can also use it at home, though it is designed for intensive usage (15,000 prints per month).

Hardware

Canon is highlighting the fact that this model doesn’t take up too much room. It's certainly compact (40 x 39.8 x 22.3 cm and 12.3 Kg), but this test comes hot on the heels of the smallest printer tested, the Samsung ML-1670. The compactness of the Canon therefore doesn't seem all that impressive to us alongside the monochrome Samsung. In terms of design, Canon’s claim to elegance is fairly relative. This i-Sensys is angular and basically resembles a black rectangle. The connectivity has been pared right back to just USB.

With 16 MB of internal memory however, it would have offered comfortable sharing. Nothing is forgotten in terms of OS support (Windows, Mac and Linux all included). The control panel is also very minimalist: 1 button and 6 signal lights.

We deplore the absence of the cancel button on the front and the lack of draft and double-sided modes as both these features are useful for minimising wastage. The paper loader holds up to 150 pages. The all-in-one cartridge is relatively easy to access and only exists in one (standard) format.

Speed

Print speeds in black & white are average, slower than the entry level monochrome Canon, the i-SENSYS LBP6000 which gives 19 pages per minute.
In colour it's really slow at just 4 ppm, one of the worst we’ve seen on a single function laser printer.

Quality

At first sight, print quality seems good, but when we used our colour sensor, the colour difference on the blue and green proved particularly high. This is a deliberate decision from Canon, giving us the green fields and blue skies and seas of our memories (far from reality). The lighter tones (magenta) are faithful and the colour of faces isn’t altered.

This isn’t all that positive for companies desiring to print their logos accurately (or any other graphic for that matter) in blue or green.

While the dE 94 readings reveal colours that aren’t always very accurate, traits are quite precise, making characters clean and legible as you can see in the reproduction of our graph below (x3 enlargement).

Energy consumption & Noise levels

While the printer doesn't consume all that much power (1 W on standby and 250 W when printing), it is quite noisey (52 dB(A)).

Cost per page: 21.9 pence with the drum

Cost per page is high both in black & white and colour. In comparison other colour laser printers are cheaper: the HP LaserJet CP1525nw costs 14.8 pence for colour prints and 2.8 pence for black & white and the Dell 5130cdn costs 5.6 pence for colour and just 0.8 pence for black & white.

ISO lifespan for text

You should only use this low-end Canon laser printer if you have low print requirements. As as soon as volumes go up above four reams, the HP LaserJet CP1525nw — even if it’s twice as expensive to buy — will be more affordable than this Canon. The dell costs ten times as much initially but becomes more economical at anything over 11 reams.