Canon’s $199.99 Pixma G3260 Wireless MegaTank All-in-One Printer is an upgrade to the Pixma G3200 reviewed here early in 2017. Overall, aside from being a little faster and $100 cheaper, this Pixma isn’t very different from its predecessor. It prints impressive-looking documents and, as a bulk-ink machine refilled by bottles instead of cartridges, churns out snapshot-size photos for pennies, with some of the lowest running costs in the business. And its lower list price makes it, unlike many ink-tank printers, a terrific value up front or at the cash register. In terms of features, print speed, and capacity, the G3260 is mediocre, but its ability to print documents for fractions of a cent—however slowly—makes it a great bargain for families and home offices.
Small and Humble
At 6.5 by 17.6 by 13 inches (HWD) with its trays closed and weighing in at 14.1 pounds, the Pixma G3260 is compact and light. It’s identical in size to its G3200 ancestor but about a pound heavier. It’s also close in size and girth to several Epson EcoTank competitors, including the EcoTank ET-2720 All-In-One Supertank and the EcoTank ET-2760 All-In-One Supertank. HP’s closest competitor to this Canon is its Smart Tank Plus 651 All-in-One, while Brother offers a few entry-level AIOs in its INKvestment Tank line, such as the MFC-J805DW.
What makes a printer an all-in-one is, of course, the inclusion of a scanner, and the proficiency of the scanner depends on whether it comes with an automatic document feeder (ADF) for handling multipage documents. Like its predecessor, the Pixma G3260 has no ADF, meaning you must place long documents on the scanning glass one page (or page side) at a time. Of the machines mentioned above, only the Brother MFC-J805DW and the HP Smart Tank Plus 651 provide ADFs.
Another feature common to cartridge-based AIOs in this price range is that many of them sport color LCD touch screens. Of the bulk-ink models mentioned here, however, only the HP has a touch screen, and it’s a monochrome one.
The Pixma’s archaic, low-tech control panel is not much to speak of, but the good news is that you can check ink levels simply by glancing at each color’s inspection window on the front of the printer as shown below. The cyan, magenta, and yellow ink tanks are located on the right side, with a larger black tank at left.
As for paper handling, the G3260 holds up to 100 sheets of plain paper or 20 sheets of snapshot-size premium photo paper in a tray that pulls up and out from the back of the chassis. The Epson ET-2720 and ET-2760 have similar trays, though neither Canon nor Epson publishes maximum and suggested monthly print volumes or duty cycles for their consumer-grade inkjets.
The HP 651 holds up to 100 sheets, as well, and though it has no maximum duty cycle rating HP does cite a recommended monthly print volume of 500 pages. The MFC-J805DW, by contrast, holds up to 150 sheets, and Brother rates its monthly duty cycle at 5,000 pages, with a recommended monthly volume of up to 1,500 prints.
Standard Interfaces and Bundled Software
The G3260’s standard interfaces are USB 2.0 for connection to a single PC and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi for wireless networking and connecting mobile devices. Mobile support comprises a collection of Android and iOS apps including Apple AirPrint, Mopria Print Service, the Canon Print app, Canon Print Service for Android, and Pixma Cloud Link.
You also get Canon’s Easy-PhotoPrint Editor software for editing and enhancing photos, creating photo albums, applying filters, and so on, as well as PosterArtist Lite for laying out posters, collages, and other documents using your images.
As with most Pixmas and other modern consumer printers, you can send basic commands such as “Print to-do list” or “Scan to [cloud site name]” via Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.
Testing the Pixma G3260: Sluggish Print Speeds, Excellent Output Quality
Canon rates the Pixma G3260 at 10.8 monochrome pages per minute (ppm), 2ppm faster than 2017’s model G3200. I tested the printer over USB from our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Pro. The first test consisted of timing the Pixma as it churned out our 12-page Microsoft Word text document. Averaging the results of several runs, I calculated its speed at 11.4ppm, slightly quicker than its rating and 3.7ppm faster than its predecessor. The Canon also beat the other models mentioned here, though in most cases by less than a page per minute (though the Epson ET-2760 managed only 8.9ppm).
The next portion of the test involved printing our collection of colorful, complex full-page business documents and presentation handouts. These consist of Adobe Acrobat documents made up of embedded graphics and colored fonts at varying weights and sizes, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with charts and graphs, and PowerPoint handouts made up of colorful charts and graphs with dark and gradient fills and backgrounds.
I combined these results with those from printing the 12-page text document to come up with an overall score of 3.1ppm. This was actually the slowest of the group, with the HP 651 leading the pack at 5.1ppm.
To finish up, I clocked the G3260 as it printed two of our colorful and detailed 4-by-6-inch snapshots, taking an average of 47 seconds. That’s about par for a printer in this class. Only the Brother MFC-J805DW needed more than a minute per photo (1 minute and 4 seconds, to be exact).
Print quality was exactly as I expected from a four-ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, or CMYK) Pixma as opposed to a five- or six-ink photo-centric model such as the Pixma G620. Text came out attractively spaced, with well-shaped, highly legible characters, and business graphics printed with solid fills and backgrounds and evenly flowing gradients. Fine details such as hairlines (rules under 1 point) were unbroken and easy to make out.
But it’s photos that Pixmas are known for, and the G3260 delivers. Its document and graphics printing may be slow, but if you start with quality images, you can expect good-looking output devoid of surprises. Colors are bright and accurate with precise details and little to no pixelation. As with most consumer-grade Pixmas (as opposed to dedicated eight- to 12-ink photo printers), the G3260 may be slow, but its photo quality should take some of the sting out of that.
Keeping the Pixma G3260 Printing
Without question, probably the most attractive feature of this and every other Canon MegaTank printer (ditto for Epson EcoTank and HP Smart Tank Plus models) is its rock-bottom running cost. Each monochrome page, for instance, will run you about 0.3 cent—that’s right, less than one-third of a penny—and color pages cost around 0.9 cent apiece.
Operating costs for MegaTank, Smart Tank Plus, and EcoTank (excluding EcoTank Pro) printers are close enough to one another to render further discussion moot. Brother’s INKvestment Tank AIOs, on the other hand, are hybrids or crossovers between cartridge and ink-tank machines—their ink comes in cartridges that offload into internal reservoirs—that cost a bit more to use, at just under a penny per black page and slightly less than a nickel for color.
In any case, the Pixma G3260’s running costs are among the lowest available. And Canon sweetens the deal by throwing in two additional bottles of black ink, increasing the number of potential black pages in the box to 18,000. That should keep you busy for a while.
Lots of Prints for Little Money
Granted, this little Pixma comes with a scanner, qualifying it as an all-in-one, but it has no ADF and brings little to the table in terms of speed, volume, and productivity or convenience features. But if all you want is to print a few hundred documents and photos each month, with no need to copy or scan multipage documents or stacks of originals, the G3260 excels. Not only is it among the least expensive consumer printers to use on an ink basis, its $100 price reduction over its predecessor makes it among the less costly bulk-ink models to buy. If you’re looking for top-notch photos, however, we’d suggest paying the extra $100 for the six-ink Pixma G620.
