Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank Printer Overview

The Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank Inkjet Printer ($249.99) is a low-volume standalone inkjet printer designed for small or home-based workplaces. A direct response to the Epson EcoTank and the Brother INKvestment merchandise designed to ship low per-page ink prices, the G1200 is one among Canon’s new MegaTank G-series printers. However as a single-function printer it is not likely in direct competitors with any of them. (The entire EcoTank and INKvestment merchandise, in addition to the opposite three Canon G-series fashions, are all-in-one machines.) A better competitor is the Editors’ Alternative HP OfficeJet Professional 6230 ($159.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a brand new window) , one other standalone printer. The G1200 is quite a bit slower than the HP mannequin, however print high quality is superb and working prices are a few of the finest within the enterprise. Even so, the G1200 ($149.00 at Adorama)(Opens in a brand new window) doesn’t assist networking, whether or not Wi-Fi or direct cellular connectivity—a characteristic each $250 printer ought to have.

Design and Options

Like EcoTank printers, G-series machines take their ink from reservoirs that you simply fill from bottles as an alternative of cartridges. However in contrast to EcoTank fashions such because the Expression ET-2550 EcoTank All-in-One Printer ($299.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a brand new window) , the place Epson merely attaches giant refillable ink reservoirs to the edges of present fashions, Canon designed the MegaTank printers from the bottom up. The reservoirs are built-in into the entrance of the chassis, slightly than being add-ons or afterthoughts, making the G-series printers higher wanting than EcoTank fashions. A big black ink container resides on the left aspect, and the opposite three (cyan, magenta, and yellow) reservoirs are situated on the fitting, permitting you to examine ink ranges by glancing on the entrance of the machine. As with EcoTank fashions, wanting on the printer is the one option to inform how a lot ink is left, though the printer does flash an alarm when a number of inks are critically low.

At 5.4 by 17.6 by 13 inches (HWD) with its trays closed, and weighing a slight 9.4 kilos, the Pixma G1200 is gentle and compact sufficient to sit down comfortably on most desktops. And for the reason that solely connectivity it helps is USB—no Ethernet, no Wi-Fi, no Wi-Fi Direct, no near-field communication (NFC)—you will want to put it in your desk or someplace near your PC. To get Wi-Fi from a MegaTank machine, you will must step as much as the Pixma G3200, an all-in-one with out an automated doc feeder (ADF), for an extra $50. Paper capability consists of 1 tray that extends from the again of the chassis and holds 100 sheets (or 20 premium picture paper sheets), and the output tray pulls out from the entrance. It is price mentioning that this Pixma helps the 5-by-5-inch picture format—impressed by Instagram, little doubt. With each trays prolonged, the G1200 is about half once more as tall and roughly 8 inches deeper. There is no such thing as a multipurpose tray for overriding the first enter supply, however then eradicating media from the paper tray and reconfiguring it’s a snap.

The Pixma G1200’s management panel consists of two buttons, Energy and Cancel, and corresponding standing LEDs. Canon publishes neither a most month-to-month responsibility cycle nor a beneficial month-to-month quantity, which is uncommon. As well as, as a result of lack of community connectivity, you’ll be able to’t print from cloud websites with out a PC, and no flash reminiscence gadgets are supported.

Setup and Software program

Setup was principally normal fare. The place it veered from the norm is that, along with filling the reservoirs from bottles, you have to set up two printheads (Canon calls them cartridges), one for black ink and one for the opposite three colours, right into a carriage harking back to these utilized in previous Pixmas that got here with solely two ink tanks. It is essential that you simply observe this a part of the Getting Began information intently; I missed a step, neglecting to take away a chunk of paper overlaying the intakes on the cartridges, which halted the set up course of—till I slowed down and figured it out. Apart from that, set up was, as it’s with most Pixmas, fast and easy, taking not more than 20 minutes, and that included a 6-minute initialization whereas the printer pumped ink from the reservoirs to the cartridges.

Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank Printer

The Canon G1200 comes with the usual consumer-grade Pixma software program bundle, which incorporates My Picture Backyard and Fast Menu. (Lacking is Artistic Park Premium, primarily a set of templates that requires the printer to go surfing.) My Picture Backyard is a set of utilities, comparable to particular results filters, Canon’s Full HD Film Prints (for printing frames from digital movies shot with Canon cameras), and instruments for picture correction and enhancement. Fast Menu is an always-on assortment of icons for accessing My Picture Backyard options and some different Canon choices, comparable to ordering ink. Fast Menu is rather more helpful when used with an all-in-one Pixma with scanning and copying options, although.

Printing Speeds

Rated at 8.8 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 5ppm for colour pages, not solely is the G1200 one of many lowest-rated printers we have reviewed speed-wise, but it surely’s additionally one of many slowest. I examined it with PC Labs’ normal Core i5 testbed PC working Home windows 10 that we deployed after reviewing the HP 6230 and the opposite machines talked about to this point; therefore, evaluating the G1200’s print speeds to these fashions’ straight is not sensible. That stated, the G1200 churned out our evenly formatted Microsoft Phrase textual content file at 7ppm, which is slower than each printer we have examined with our present benchmarking methodology, apart from the Epson WorkForce Professional ET-16500 EcoTank All-in-One Supertank Printer ($999.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a brand new window) (4.7ppm), a wide-format multifunction enterprise printer.

See How We Check Printers

Once I included our Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint paperwork containing colour, images, and graphics, the G1200 bogged right down to 2.9ppm, this time falling behind even the ET-16500 (4.4ppm). It did print our check snapshots shortly, although. At 20 seconds to print our borderless 4-by-6-inch images, the G1200 equaled Canon’s personal consumer-grade picture printers, together with the not too long ago reviewed Canon Pixma TS9020 Wi-fi Inkjet All-in-One Printer.

Print High quality

Like many Pixmas, this one has distinctive print high quality. Textual content got here out darkish and extremely legible right down to 4 factors (with magnification), and even a few of the extra obscure ornamental fonts we check regarded good at smaller sizes, too. However the place the G1200 excelled was in printing enterprise graphics (charts and graphs) and particularly images. The darkish backgrounds and gradients in our check paperwork, which many printers cannot reproduce with out banding or streaking, got here out practically flawless. Our check {photograph} prints had been probably the most spectacular, although. Once I took the time to enter the motive force to set the correct paper kind and the picture high quality to Excessive, images had been vibrant and detailed, a minimum of nearly as good as I’ve seen from photo-centric Pixmas, together with the six-ink MG7720 and the brand new TS9020.

As well as, general print high quality was greater than with the HP, Epson, and Brother fashions talked about above.

Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank Printer

Working Prices

As with EcoTank printers (and INKvestment printers, although they use normal cartridges), you pay extra for MegaTank merchandise up entrance to compensate for a decrease—on this case, a lot decrease—per-page price of ink. The G1200, for instance, lists for $150 greater than the HP 6230, however comes with sufficient ink to final for as much as yr or extra (relying on how a lot and what you print). And substitute ink bottles are (on each a per-page and by-the-bottle foundation) fairly cheap. That is the one standalone printer that we all know of designed and marketed particularly to avoid wasting on working prices.

The black ink bottle holds 135 milliliters (ml) and is rated at 6,000 pages, and the three colour bottles maintain 70ml every, for a complete of seven,000 prints, when mixed with the black ink. Utilizing these page-yield numbers and Canon’s marketed worth for the bottles, the monochrome and colour price per web page involves lower than 1 cent, or 0.3 cent and 0.8 cent, respectively. These numbers are much like these of Epson’s EcoTank printers on this worth vary, and far decrease than Brother’s INKvestment printer working prices. The Brother MFC-J985DW XL ($738.21 at Amazon)(Opens in a brand new window) (a barely dearer—$50—all-in-one with an ADF), for instance, delivers 1 cent for monochrome pages and slightly below 5 cents for colour ones.

Conclusion

The Canon Pixma G1200, whereas sluggish, prints exceptionally and inexpensively, throughout the board, however at $250 it lacks many options out there on competing fashions, comparable to Wi-Fi or cellular and cloud connectivity choices. The closest (in worth) EcoTank and INKvestment opponents, the Epson ET-2550 and Brother MFC-J985DW XL, respectively, listing for $50 extra. However they’re multifunction printers that assist scanning and copying, in addition to Wi-Fi, and practically each different characteristic talked about right here, together with cellular connectivity. So does the Editors’ Alternative HP 6230 standalone printer, which additionally helps Ethernet connectivity, however has a lot greater working prices (3 cents for monochrome pages and 9.9 cents colour). Granted, price per web page is essential, however not as a lot on low-volume printers like these. Even so, if all you want is to print from a single PC, it is robust to beat the Pixma G1200’s output high quality and working prices—particularly for printing images.