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.
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 ET-8500, 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 XP-8600 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 to two four-ink printers, HP’s Smart Tank Plus 651 Wireless All-in-One and Brother’s MFC-J805DW INKvestment Tank All-In-One. 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 which dump their payloads into internal tanks. They’re the closest that both manufacturers offer by way of competition.
The Pixma G620 is technically an all-in-one (AIO) printer, in that it includes a scanner for making copies of or digitizing hard-copy documents for archiving or other applications. But its lack of an automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending multipage documents to the scanner is rare for a $300 printer. With this Pixma, as with several other photo-optimized Pixma G and TS series models and many competitors, you must load pages (or page sides) onto the platen or scanner glass manually, repeating the process one at a time until your stack of originals is finished or you wise up and buy a printer with an ADF.
Of the machines mentioned here, only the HP and Brother AIOs come with automatic document feeders, and recall that neither are actual photo printers (though both print photos passable for many different applications). Its lack of an ADF is, however, not the Pixma’s sole shortcoming. A 20th-century control panel makes configuring the device for making multiple copies or other actions more difficult than it would be on a graphical touch screen like the Pixma TS9120’s or the two Epsons’. The G620 offers only a bunch of buttons and a two-line monochrome text display.
In addition, the G620 (like many competitors) comes with meager paper-handling options. A single rear tray holds up to 100 sheets of plain paper or 20 sheets of snapshot-size (4-by-6-inch) premium photo paper. Among the machines discussed here, Brother’s MFC-J805DW offers a 150-sheet paper tray, and the Pixma TS9120 holds 200 sheets split between two trays. The others hold 100 sheets or fewer.
Canon, like Epson, doesn’t publish estimated monthly volume ratings or suggested daily duty cycles for its consumer-grade photo printers. Suffice it to say you should probably print a maximum in the tens, rather than hundreds, of pages or photos per day.
Connecting to and Using the Pixma G620
The Pixma provides a USB 2.0 port for connection to a single PC and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi for wireless networking to PCs, Macs, or Android or iOS smartphones and tablets. You also get Wireless PictBridge for printing from certain Canon digital cameras and video recorders.
Canon also throws in a slew of mobile apps and utilities, including Apple AirPrint, Mopria Print Service for Android, Canon Print and Easy-PhotoPrint Editor apps, Pixma Chat Print, Pixma Cloud Link for mobile devices, Canon Print Service for Android, and the Canon Creative Park app.
Most of these names speak for themselves. Pixma Chat Print, for example, isolates and prints chat conversation threads. Pixma Cloud Link connects to your favorite cloud sites, letting you print from or scan to one at a time or several simultaneously. The Easy-PhotoPrint Editor app runs across all four major platforms—Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS—and does exactly what its name suggests.
With Easy-PhotoPrint Editor, you can make corrections or enhancements, apply filters such as red-eye removal, or convert color images to grayscale. You can also create and manage photo albums, either in the cloud or on your computing device.
Unfortunately, the Pixma G620 doesn’t let you print from or save to flash memory devices such as USB thumb drives or SD cards. The Epson ET-8500 and ET-8550 both support various flavors of flash cards and drives.
Testing the Pixma G620: Simply Sluggish
Canon rates the G620 at a meager 3.9 pages per minute (ppm) for both monochrome and color prints. Frankly, I can’t remember reviewing an inkjet with a lower rated speed; even the $159.99 Pixma G1220 is considerably faster. Compared to the other printers mentioned here, this Pixma is at best half as fast. The Brother MFC-J805DW, for example, is rated at 12ppm, with the Epson ET-8500 rated at 16ppm for monochrome pages.
I tested the printer over a USB connection to our testbed PC, an Intel Core i5 desktop running Windows 10 Pro. For the first test, I clocked the G620 as it printed our 12-page Microsoft Word text file. It churned out all 12 pages at an average of 6ppm, actually 2.1ppm quicker than its rating. Even so, all the machines talked about here save for the Pixma G1220 (8.9ppm) were at least 4ppm faster. The EcoTank Photo ET-8500 managed 16.1ppm.
Next, I timed the G620 as it printed our collection of colorful and complex full-page business documents, consisting of Adobe Acrobat PDFs resplendent with business graphics and typefaces of varying sizes, weights, and colors; Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and accompanying full-page charts and graphs; and Microsoft PowerPoint presentation handouts with lively colors, solid and gradient fills, and typefaces.
Combining the results of those tests with that from the text file, I came up with an overall score of 3.4ppm, which is the slowest of this group. (For the record, it’s not the slowest we’ve seen; the HP Tango X holds that honor among modern printers at 1.8ppm.)
Most important, however, is how quickly the G620 prints photos. By my stopwatch, it printed our very colorful and highly detailed 4-by-6-inch borderless snapshots in an average of 46 seconds each. That’s slightly faster than several of its competitors, and 10 seconds or more faster than a few. (The six-ink Pixma TS9120 was quickest, at 32 seconds per snapshot.)
Near-Perfect Photos for Pennies
The good news is that the Pixma G620’s output quality is worth waiting for, especially photos. In all the years I’ve been testing six-ink Pixmas, I can’t recall coming across one that didn’t print well. I challenged this one with high-res test images ranging in size from 4 by 6 inches to 8-by-10-inch and letter-size, all borderless. And while the larger images took some time to print, they all came out brilliantly and accurately colored with impressive detail.
Text and business graphics looked good, too, with well-shaped characters legible at small sizes. Dark backgrounds and gradient fills were devoid of ink distribution issues. The G620 is slow, to be sure, making it practical for only short print and even shorter copy jobs. No matter what you’re printing, however—text documents with 5% to 10% ink coverage, or photos with 100% coverage—this is one cheap-to-use consumer photo printer, at around 0.3 cent per monochrome page, or 0.9 cent per color page (and, according to Canon, 2.5 cents per 4-by-6 snapshot).
All G-series or MegaTank Pixmas, HP Smart Tank Plus printers, and Epson EcoTank models (EcoTank Pro machines are different animals) deliver very similar running costs of under a penny for both black and color pages. Canon says the G620 comes with enough ink in the box to print up to 3,800 snapshots (4 by 6 inches each). By contrast, cartridge-based Pixmas such as the TS9120 and Epson Expression Photo machines like the XP-8600 (six-ink models both) can cost as much as 15 to 20 times more to use. While they print just as well, you should only consider them if your print and copy volume is low—say, say no more than 100 photos and the occasional document each month.
A Near-Dedicated Consumer Photo Printer
While there are plenty of consumer-grade photo printers available, few are as inexpensive to use as the Pixma G620, and it’s half the price of its closest competitor, the Epson ET-8500. To be sure, the EcoTank model is beefier and faster, supports SD cards and USB thumb drives, and prints two-sided pages automatically. And the G620’s lack of an automatic document feeder makes it (like the ET-8500) inefficient as an all-in-one. But the bottom line is that, like the Epson, the Canon is a terrific photo printer, though much the slower of the two. If you don’t mind a little waiting, the Pixma G620 will save you a bundle up front while offering comparable output quality and operating costs.
