Excellent photo printing hasn’t been all that rare a talent for quite some time now. Shop your local big-box store or favorite online retailer for a printer, and many of the all-in-one (AIO) inkjets you’ll see, even some of the cheap ones, crank out decent-looking-or-better photos.
Few, if any, however, get as close to the quality of true high-end professional photo printers as Canon’s Pixma line of six-ink ChromaLife100+ devices consistently do. Take last year’s $199.99 Pixma MG6120 and $299.99 Pixma MG8120, for example. Although these models lack a few key business-centric productivity and convenience features, such as an automatic document feeder (ADF), the rich color depth and highly detailed photographs produced by these models are among the best we’ve seen from consumer-grade printers. Plus, being AIO models, they can make copies and scan, too.
This is also true of Canon’s $299.99 Pixma MG8220, which replaces the Pixma MG8120. In terms of output quality and speed, the Pixma MG8220 is nearly identical to last year’s model. Aside from a few cosmetic changes, and the addition of a optical-disc surface-printing feature, we found few differences between the two. Like the Pixma MG8120, the MG8220 is primarily a photograph printer, with the ability to print nice-looking business documents, make copies, and scan thrown in.
Apart from the lack of ADF, there’s one other drawback: Like its predecessor, this Pixma has a relatively high per-page cost of printing. (That’s mostly the fault of the ink, which isn’t cheap.) But if you want superior-looking, long-lasting photographs from a moderately priced inkjet printer—and the ADF and ink costs aren’t deterrents—look no further.
Design & Features
Measuring 7.9 inches high by 15.6 inches wide by 18.5 inches deep, and weighing 23.6 pounds, the Pixma MG8220 is all but identical in size, shape, and heft to the Pixma MG8120. The only major exterior difference between the two models is the later model’s textured, dull-black case. Last year’s model, like several other AIOs in the Pixma line, had a high-gloss finish, which we found very attractive but too prone to smudges and scratches. The new textured finish diminishes the eye appeal of the printer, but it’s a lot more practical.
Under the hood, the Pixma MG8220 is loaded with durable-looking reinforced metal parts, including the ink-cartridge carriage rails. The carriage holds six ink tanks: the four standard process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black), an extra-large black pigment ink for dark text, and a gray ink that enhances gray-scale images and increases the printer’s overall color reproduction range (“color space”).
This model’s reliance on six inks makes calculating the cost per page (CPP) of its consumables a little trickier than figuring out the CPP for printers that use a standard four-ink system. (Read more about how we calculate cost per page.) The two additional inks change the formula for making these calculations—especially for full-color documents—considerably.
With that said, here are the numbers we calculated: Black-and-white prints run about 4.7 cents each, and color prints run about 13.7 cents each. These are not the highest numbers we’ve seen, but they are higher than average for printers in this class and price range. You can reduce the cost per page a bit by purchasing your ink tanks in the various combo packs that Canon offers, decreasing the monochrome per-page cost to about 4.4 cents and the color cost to about 12 cents.
Apart from that lack of an ADF—which would auto-feed multipage documents to the scanner bed, without making you fumble with one page at a time—the Pixma MG8220 has most of the productivity features you’d expect from a $299 AIO. It has an automatic duplexer (for printing double-sided pages unassisted), as well as slots and ports for a wide range of memory cards and USB flash drives, making it easy to print from and scan to most kinds of memory device. You can also use the USB port for connecting smartphones, digital cameras, and other peripherals.
Direct-to-computer and network connectivity are also fully provided for. In addition to the printer’s built-in Wi-Fi, you can connect the Pixma to your network via a wired Ethernet jack, or directly to a PC via its USB 2.0 port. Canon also distributes a pair of apps, Easy-PhotoPrint for iPhone and Easy-PhotoPrint for Android, that allow you to print from iPhones, iPads, and most smartphones and tablets running on Google’s Android OS. Easy-PhotoPrint also supports scanning to mobile devices in either PDF or JPEG formats. This option, which we’ve seen on several AIO printers lately, can save you a bunch of steps in getting documents and images from the scanner to your handheld.
Another feature showing up lately on many AIOs is the ability to print labels on appropriately surfaced CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. This Pixma handles this via an included caddy. You snap a disc into it, then slide it into the printer under the scanner bed. To design your label, you can use the bundled Disc Label or Case Cover add-on for the bundled Easy-PhotoPrint software.
In addition to working with the disc-labeling function, Easy-PhotoPrint helps you organize, label, lay out, and print your ordinary images and documents. It also lets you make some rudimentary enhancements, such as noise reduction, converting color images to gray scale, or applying special effects (among them Fish-eye, Soft Focus, and Blur Background). Canon includes a bunch of other handy software, as well. You get utilities for creating calendars, photo albums, brochures, and flyer layouts, as well as a Movie Print utility, which lets you capture frames from videos shot with Canon digital cameras and camcorders. In addition, when printing from a memory device via the control panel, you can apply an AutoFix filter that corrects bad photos, as well as a red-eye removal filter. (Both do a reasonable job.)
Overall, the software bundle is able, but we don’t think that most of the folks buying this printer will think it adds much value. Considering that the Pixma MG8220 is a photo-centric printer capable of turning out exceptional-quality images, this basic software will be of limited appeal to photo enthusiasts. Those users will already own or want to invest in a full-blown image editor, such as Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 10 or perhaps even the pro-grade Creative Suite 5 version of Photoshop.
Setup
Even compared with just a year or so ago, setting up and installing AIO printers has become so simple that there’s just not much to talk about. The Pixma MG8220 is no exception.
After we removed the packing material and plugged in the printer, the LCD screen on the printer’s top walked us through the entire process, showing detailed pictures and instructions. It explained how to prepare the ink cartridges, where to insert them, and how to make sure they were seated properly.
Then, the setup wizard walked us through connecting to our wireless network. (We didn’t need to connect directly via USB cable first.) If you have a router that supports Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), connecting to the network entails pressing a couple of buttons (one on the router, and one on the printer). The two devices should find each other and make the connection. If you don’t have a WPS router, a few more steps are involved, but the LCD makes that easy, too.
Like some other Pixma photo printers we’ve tested, this model calibrates itself by printing on a special form that comes with the printer. The LCD prompts you for the calibration form during setup, making this slightly unusual step easy, too.
Paper Handling
The Pixma MG8220 has two input trays: a 100-sheet drawer that slides into the front of the machine, and a “specialty paper” input tray that folds out at the back. A 150-sheet output tray folds out from the front, just above the input tray.
Specialty trays are always nice. They allow you to print one-off photos, envelopes, forms, and labels without having to remove and reconfigure the main input drawer. In the case of the Pixma MG8220, when you tell the print driver to print on any type of media other than 8.5×11-inch plain paper, the printer automatically switches to the rear tray. You’re not wedded to that, though: You can also configure the drawer for 4×6-inch photo paper, envelopes, or other media, in the event you need to print a flurry of envelopes or photos in one print run.
During our tests, in which we printed hundreds of business-document pages, many photographs, and several two-sided documents, the Pixma MG8220 performed flawlessly. We didn’t observe a single paper jam or any other printing mishap. But then, we wouldn’t expect anything less from a $299 printer.
Control Panel
The Pixma MG8220 has the same stylish, contextually smart control panel as its predecessor, the Pixma MG8120. In fact, we found it to be one of the more impressive features of last year’s model.
What about this year? Even though the novelty has worn off, we still think this is one of the slickest consumer-printer control panels around. Rather than mounting it in the front face, Canon has inlaid the control panel into the scanner lid, and the LCD screen behind it tips up for viewing. The only traditional physical buttons—the power button, and a five-way menu-navigation wheel with an OK button in the center—are quite similar to the controls on many smartphones.
When the printer is idle, two blue lights (a Wi-Fi-connection indicator, and a power indicator) let you know it’s alive. The rest of the controls, also inlaid in the scanner lid, are LEDs that remain dark until you wake up the printer. Then, according to the task at hand, a subset of them illuminate. If you’re scanning, for example, the panel displays only options for operating the scanner and saving the scanned file.
In the middle of this striking-looking array of lights, you’ll find the high-resolution 3.5-inch LCD. You can use it to navigate the somewhat complex menu structure from the navigation wheel, or from three contextually lit buttons located just under the screen. However you navigate the screen, its well-thought-out menus are easy to scroll through and figure out.
Printing Performance
We assess printing performance from two perspectives: quality and speed. In a nutshell, Canon’s Pixma printers consistently turn out some of the best-quality business documents and photos we’ve seen, and this one is no exception. As for how fast you’ll get them, the Pixma MG8220’s print speeds are slightly above average, whether you’re comparing this printer with $99 entry-level inkjets or comparably priced $300 photo-centric ones.
For example, we printed our 20-page sample document in our Text-Document Test in Standard mode (Canon’s equivalent to “normal” mode). Our test unit cranked out all 20 pages in 1 minute and 56 seconds (1:56), and the first page out in 14.1 seconds. (The latter is a subsidiary test we perform, measuring the time between when the printer starts receiving data and the first page lands on the output tray.) By comparison, the $299 HP Photosmart Premium printed all 20 pages in 2:15, and the first page out in 18.2 seconds. (Incidentally, all Canon Pixma models, whether they cost $99 or $300, turned in nearly identical speeds on this test.)
Where this Canon model differs is in the ink-cartridge configuration. Some of the lower-cost Pixmas, such as the $149.99 Pixma MG5320, use a five-ink system, versus the MG8220’s six-ink system, which does boost the image quality. Although the Pixma MG5320’s print quality on our 10-Page Mixed Text and Graphic Document Test was quite good, the color quality and detail we got from the MG8220 was noticeably better. Our test unit printed all 10 pages of the mixed document in Standard mode in 1 minute and 35 seconds (1:35), or about 17 seconds faster than the HP Photosmart Premium’s 1:54. In Best mode (Canon’s equivalent to “fine”), the MG8220 took 9:12 to print all 10 pages—more than six times longer than printing the same document in Standard mode. However, we saw very little difference in quality between the two modes. Frankly, most business documents won’t benefit enough from the higher Best setting to justify the extra time.
Though the sample documents we generated looked excellent, the Pixma MG8220 is still a photo printer first and a document printer a distant second. As we noted at the start, many inkjet AIOs do an excellent job at printing photographs, but few, if any, do it as well as Canon’s six-ink Pixmas. The rich colors and intricate detail this model produced on our test images was remarkable.
Plus, in our Photo-Printing Test, the MG8220 printed our test photos as fast as or faster than most other photo-centric competitors, excepting Canon’s other Pixmas. For example, our test unit printed our large 8.5×11-inch image in Best mode in 2 minutes. In contrast, Epson’s $299.99 Artisan 837, another new photo-enthusiast printer, took 2:52 on this same test, in the same mode. That’s almost a third slower.
Scan & Copy Performance
The lack of an ADF makes copying and scanning multipage documents time-consuming on this model. If you copy or scan multipage documents often, you should consider a different machine. Many are available with ADFs at the same price.
This limitation aside, the Pixma MG8220 makes decent copies at speeds slightly above average. In our Copy Performance Test, it copied our mixed text-and-graphics page, for example, in 17.6 seconds, which is faster than most AIOs we’ve tested.
In keeping with the photo-centric nature of this machine, this model has scanning functions unavailable on most competing products. It allows you to scan 35mm slides, film, and negatives—several at a time—and turn them into usable digital photographs. If you have a shoebox full of slides or negatives, this nice side feature can help you convert and add them to your digital photo library.
In addition, this model scans documents and photographs well, and at respectable speeds. In our Scanning Performance Test, it scanned all of our test documents faster than nearly every other AIO we’ve tested in this price range.
Conclusion
If output quality is far and away your first concern in a midprice inkjet printer, the Pixma MG8220 belongs on your short list. Regardless of what kind of job you throw at it, this printer turns out stellar-quality output. Taking a wider view, though, we have to categorize this model as a niche photo printer, best suited for photo enthusiasts.
That’s because its lack of an ADF and the cost of ink renders it less than ideal for home offices or small offices—especially ones that print a lot every day. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a photo printer with exquisite output quality, and could use the additional AIO features, you’ll have trouble finding an AIO better suited to the task than Canon’s Pixma MG8220.
Indeed, the next step up from the Pixma MG8220 is a professional single-function photo printer—and note that we said “single-function.” If you need to scan and copy often, that means you’d also need other hardware on hand for those tasks. As a result, this machine could deliver excellent value—quality and versatility—if you don’t need to go pro.
Source:http://computershopper.com/printers/reviews/canon-pixma-mg8220
