
The Canon i-SENSYS LBP5360 is a colour laser printer with a number of eye catching features. These come in the form of speed, first page out time, the DPI and the toner capacities. According to Canon the i-SENSYS range is designed to be space efficient, minimise energy and save time. All of which the i-SENSYS LBP5360 lives up to.
The i-SENSYS LBP5360 is designed with an in-line laser engine which works vertically so paper being fed from the 250 sheet paper tray at the bottom passes up the printer and feeds out to its top surface. In doing this the paper passes a colour print mechanism which applies all four colours in a single pass. This may not sound like such an amazing feature until you realise that this means your colour prints will at last run at the same speed as your mono (black) prints.
We found the print speeds to be exceptionally good, with our 5 page black text document printing in just 25 seconds giving us a fantastic print speed of 11ppm. What then surprised us was the time it took to print our five-page mixture of colour graphics and text document. The i-SENSYS LBP5360 printed this document in just 20 seconds (14ppm), which is an amazing 5 seconds faster than a plain black text document and an incredible speed for text and graphics. The LBP5360 also has automatic duplex print capabilities which we also tested. Our 20 side document took only 1:17, this is just over 15 sides a minute and almost the Canon quoted speed of 21ppm. The first page print took only 13 seconds to come through, which is just a bit slower than the quoted 10 seconds. With such little warm up time the i-SENSYS LBP5360 is able to wake from sleep mode almost instantly when it receives a print job.
The print quality of the LBP5360 is also very good with black text coming through sharp, clear and well defined with well-formed characters even at smaller font sizes. Colour graphics were smooth and true to the on screen image. Even colour photos looked natural and smooth which is not what the Printer Experts normally see from a colour laser printer. This is in no small part down to the LBP5360s amazing 9600 x 600 dpi resolution.
Although the i-SENSYS LBP5360 has four separate drum and toner cartridges to maintain the running costs are definitely at the cheaper end of the spectrum. With each cartridge able to produce 6,000 pages at 5 per cent cover you will not be forever maintaining them.
Overall the Canon i-SENSYS LBP5360 is a great colour laser printer. It is able to turn out high quality prints at blistering speed. With a low asking price, cheap running costs and easy maintenance this a very attractive purchase for a small office or large workgroup. The i-SENSYS LBP5360 is highly recommended by the Printer Experts.