Canon Pixma G620
$299.99
It’s easy to find a bulk-ink printer with the familiar cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) quartet, but finding an ink-tank- rather than cartridge-based inkjet with six inks for superior photo quality has been difficult, prohibitively expensive, or both. Canon aims to change that with the Pixma G620 Wireless MegaTank Photo All-in-One Printer, which gets its tank refills from bottles. At $299.99, it’s half the price of the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 Wireless Color All-in-One Supertank. Versus that Epson, the Canon is slow and short on features, so it doesn’t join it (or the wide-format EcoTank Photo ET-8550) as an Editors’ Choice award winner. But the Pixma prints terrific-looking borderless photos at sizes up to 8.5 by 11 inches for pennies, making it a great value for families and home offices that churn out, say, the occasional work-related document and up to a few hundred photos each month.
Canon Pixma G620
PROS Excellent print quality, especially photos. Very low running costs. Strong software bundle and robust mobile device support.
CONS Last-century control panel. No automatic document feeder (ADF). Slow printing.
BOTTOM LINE The six-ink Canon Pixma G620 prints extremely well, especially for photos, at some of the lowest running costs in the business. Its low speed and missing automatic document feeder disqualify it for office work, but it’s a great value for families.
POISED FOR PRINTING PHOTOS
The Pixma G620 measures 5.8 by 17.2 by 12.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 17.4 pounds. Among its many competitors (both bulk-ink and cartridge-based models), these specs are about average. The Epson ET8500, for example, is slightly bigger and 1.1 pounds heavier, while the ET-8550 is more than twice as bulky.
Both Canon and Epson offer several cartridge-based five- and six-ink consumer-grade photo printers, such as the Pixma TS9120 and the Expression Photo XP8600 Small-in-One respectively. But as you’ll see below, those machines cost considerably more to use than their bulk-ink counterparts.
For this review, I’ll compare the Canon G620 not only to the Epson ET-8500 but also to two four-ink printers, the HP Smart Tank Plus 651 Wireless All-in-One and the Brother MFC-J805DW INKvestment Tank All-InOne. They’re not direct rivals as photo printers, but the Smart Tank Plus 651 is one of HP’s bulk-ink printers with internal reservoirs refilled from relatively inexpensive bottles, while INKvestment Tank is Brother’s brand for a hybrid system using ink cartridges that dump their payloads into internal tanks. They’re the closest machines that both manufacturers offer by way of competition.
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