Canon BJC-4000

What the Canon BJC-4000 Was

The Canon BJC-4000 is a color Bubble Jet inkjet printer aimed at home and small-office users, part of Canon's BJC (Bubble Jet Color) line; Canon's own documentation titles it the "Color Bubble Jet Printer BJC-4000." It prints in monochrome or full color depending on which of two interchangeable cartridges is installed, feeds cut sheets from an upright automatic sheet feeder, and connects to a PC through a parallel port. Canon positioned it as a compact, lightweight desktop machine that occupies little desk space and handles low-volume printing of text, graphics, and color documents.

Bubble Jet (Thermal Inkjet) Technology

"Bubble Jet" is Canon's name for its thermal, drop-on-demand inkjet process; the user manual gives the printing method simply as "bubble jet ink on-demand." A resistive heater at each nozzle flash-boils ink to form a vapor bubble that ejects a single droplet onto the page — a non-impact method that the manual highlights for its quiet operation. The printer resolves black text and graphics at 720 x 360 dots per inch (the 720-dpi horizontal figure applying in smoothing mode) and color output at 360 x 360 dpi.

The BC-20 and BC-21 Cartridge System

Instead of a fixed head, the BJC-4000 uses interchangeable BJ cartridges that each integrate the print head with ink. The BC-20 Black cartridge carries a 128-nozzle head and black ink for fast, economical text. The BC-21 Color cartridge combines a head with 64 black nozzles and 24 nozzles for each of cyan, magenta, and yellow, and accepts replaceable BCI-21 Black and BCI-21 Color ink cartridges so the head can be reused as ink is topped up. Swapping between the two cartridges lets a single machine either print draft text quickly or produce four-color output.

Interface, Emulations, and Fonts

The printer connects through an 8-bit, Centronics-compatible parallel port. It provides three resident control modes: Canon Extended Mode, an Epson LQ mode that emulates the Epson LQ-2550, and a BJ mode that emulates the IBM Proprinter X24E — so it could be driven by DOS software written for those widely used printers as well as by Canon's Windows driver. Resident typefaces in Epson LQ mode include Roman, Sans Serif, Courier, Prestige, Script, Orator, Orator-S, and Draft, while BJ mode offers Prestige and Courier; the input buffer is 32 KB in Epson LQ mode and up to 64 KB in BJ mode. A Canon TrueType Font Pack for Microsoft Windows 3.1 shipped alongside the printer.

Paper Handling and Media

An automatic sheet feeder holds roughly 100 sheets of plain paper, 40 transparencies or back-print film sheets, or 15 envelopes, and a manual-feed path accepts heavier stock. Supported paper sizes are Letter, Legal, and A4, plus U.S. Commercial No. 10 and European DL envelopes. Media weight ranges from 17 to 24 lb (64–90 g/m2) through the automatic feeder and up to 28 lb (105 g/m2) by manual feed. Canon lists its own coated paper (LF-101), glossy paper (GP-101), transparency film (CF-102), and Back Print Film (BF-102) as compatible media.

Size, Power, and Operating Range

The BJC-4000 measures 365 mm wide, 206 mm deep, and 186 mm high (13.7 x 8.1 x 7.3 in) and weighs about 3.6 kg (7.9 lb). The U.S./Canada model runs on AC 120 V, 60 Hz, drawing up to 45 W while printing and 10.8 W when idle, with a rated acoustic noise level of roughly 45 dB(A) under ISO 9296. Canon specifies an operating range of 5–35 °C (41–95 °F) at 10–90% relative humidity, with no condensation.

Place in Canon's Bubble Jet Line and Current Status

The BJC-4000 belongs to Canon's Bubble Jet Color family, which grew out of the company's late-1980s and early-1990s inkjet work — Canon introduced its first full-color Bubble Jet printer, the BJC-820, in 1992. The consumer BJC-4000's interchangeable-cartridge design and its bundled Windows 3.1 software place it within Canon's mid-1990s home and small-office range. However, the exact launch date is not stated in Canon's user manual, and neither Canon's corporate history timeline nor Wikipedia's list of Canon products assigns it a documented release year, so no specific date is asserted here. The model is long out of production and now appears only in Canon's legacy support archives.