Canon i-Sensys LBP3250 review

Canon’s LBP3250 mono laser printer is a compact and thoughtfully designed device. Its specification is modest – a single USB port, low noise levels and 8,000 page maximum monthly duty cycle make it a good personal laser printer for home or office use. We were impressed by small touches like a flap to provide easier access to the printer’s recessed USB port, which spared us the usual process of fumbling blindly to get the cable into position. We also liked its sleek design, with a hinged dust cover to keep the output clean when not in use. Even if you start printing with the cover closed, pages can still emerge through a narrow slit in the cover. The input tray folds out from the front of the machine.

It’s easy to set up and install, with a simple driver and just one consumable – a black toner cartridge with an integrated photoconductor drum. We were also pleased to find that the LBP3250 comes with a 1,000 page starter cartridge. Replacement 2,000 page 1871B002AA cartridges cost £49 each. This produces a page cost of 2.5p. While this isn’t significantly higher than the average price of a mono page from most similarly priced laser and inkjet printers, it doesn’t stand out when compared to the print costs of other, cheaper, mono lasers.

The printer’s Total Cost of Ownership also fails to impress. If you’re a light user, printing 100 pages a month for a total of 3,600 over three years, you can expect to spend £198 over that period. This rises to £590 for medium users printing 21,000 pages over the same three-year period.

Print speeds are among the quickest we’ve seen from a compact mono laser device, at 21.7ppm in our mono text test and 20.6ppm for our heavily illustrated greyscale business documents. Standard quality text and business illustrations were sharp, dark and solid.

Although the printer has a fixed native resolution of 600x600dpi, there are three different quality settings: Standard, Text/Lines and Web Pages, which use resolution enhancement to create an effective resolution of up to 2,400x600dpi. Text/Lines mode is designed to smooth jagged edges when producing mono prints of coloured text and line drawings.

The Web Pages setting helps to ensure optimal quality when printing graphics-heavy content like web pages, photos or illustrated documents. We used the latter for our photo printing tests. This made no difference to the speed at which our photographic images printed – 16 seconds for six images on three sheets of A4 – but produced some noticeable improvements to their quality by smoothing out areas that appeared grainy in Standard quality mode.

The LBP3250 is well designed, with great print quality, and remarkably quick print speeds for such a compact device. However, unless you’re particularly taken by its sleek design and quick printing, its running costs aren’t good enough to beat the competition. If you’re a light user with a small initial budget, Epson’s Aculaser M1200 costs less than half the price to buy, while users with heavy printing requirements should look at either Samsung’s SCX-4600 mono laser MFP or ML-2525 single-function printer.