Falcon has just had confirmation that Canon's flagship mid-sized colour MFP/photocopier, the Canon imageRUNNER Advance C5051 has received the BERTL 2011 Award for 'Best Midsized Colour MFP'. Having earned the highest possible ranking from BERTL earlier in the year, with a five star 'Exceptional' assessment, it looked likely the C5051 would do well in the awards but being honoured with BERTL's 'Best Colour MFP/photocopier' is about the highest praise possible.

BERTL is the world's leading Business Equipment Research and Testing Laboratory, from where it derives its name. BERTL provides product evaluation reports and comparisons on a wide range of imaging devices and document management solutions. BERTL bases its assesments around the end-user's experience and is able to get its hands on almost all manufacturers devices, often before they're released for general sale. The analyses are published in BERTL's evaluation reports, vertical market research, its comparisons data and on the news section of its website, which is available for all subscribers.

The BERTL Awards have moved away from the conventional performance criteria - speed and feed productivity, artificial reliability test performance and theoretical pricing towards an assessment rationale which takes better account of the end-user and typical business dynamics. Device workflow requirements for instance are considered, security is taken into account, document production needs and user group management options are all borne in MIND. BERTL's Awards categories are still based on performance but more in relation to the real-world environments in which they photocopiers are deployed, so that the primary categories are now desktop, workgroup, departmental and production.

Earlier this year BERTL had awarded the imageRUNNER Advance C5051 photocopier with its highest possible rating - a five star 'exceptional'. What had really stood out for the judges at BERTL was the imageRUNNER Advance C5051's "exceptional image quality when compared with competitors in its class."

Now, in BERTL's celebrated annual awards, the imageRUNNER Advance C5051 photocopier has received one of the highest accolades possible, the Award for 'Best Midsized Colour Workgroup MFP'.

Besides the outstanding image quality that was highlighted in BERTL's rating of the photocopier earlier in the year, the awards team noted the photocopiers Advanced Box shared folders which allow files to be stores and accessed from multiple locations including a PC or other imageRUNNER Advance networked photocopiers/devices on the system.

The impressive package of security features which are a particularly important criteria in this photocopiers category also caught the judges' attention. There's departmental ID Management, Secure Print, a Trusted Platform Module, User Access Control Advanced Box, Mailbox Password Protection, IPv6, Restricting, SSL Encrypted Communication, SNMPv1/v3, MAC/IP Address Filtering, SMTP Authetication, POP Authetication before SMTP, HDD Format, and Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES Integration.

Also noted was the imageRUNNER Advance's Desktop Utility which gives users the ability to control and monitor photocopier operations from the desktop.

Falcon was delighted to hear that the the Canon imageRUNNER Advance C5051 photocopier has been honoured in the BERTL Awards. The model along with other Canon imageRUNNER Advance photocopiers is currently available for purchase or on a photocopier leasing deal.