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The Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank Inkjet Printer ($249.99) is a low-volume standalone inkjet printer designed for small or home-based offices. A direct response to the Epson EcoTank and the Brother INKvestment products designed to deliver low per-page ink costs, the G1200 is one of Canon’s new MegaTank G-series printers. But as a single-function printer it’s not really in direct competition with any of them. (All of the EcoTank and INKvestment products, as well as the other three Canon G-series models, are all-in-one machines.) A closer competitor is the Editors’ Choice HP OfficeJet Pro 6230 ($129.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , another standalone printer. The G1200 is a lot slower than the HP model, but print quality is excellent and running costs are some of the best in the business. Even so, the G1200 ($149.00 at Adorama)(Opens in a new window) does not support networking, whether Wi-Fi or direct mobile connectivity—a feature every $250 printer should have.
Design and Features
Like EcoTank printers, G-series machines take their ink from reservoirs that you fill from bottles instead of cartridges. But unlike EcoTank models such as the Expression ET-2550 EcoTank All-in-One Printer ($663.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , where Epson simply attaches large refillable ink reservoirs to the sides of existing models, Canon designed the MegaTank printers from the ground up. The reservoirs are integrated into the front of the chassis, rather than being add-ons or afterthoughts, making the G-series printers better looking than EcoTank models. A large black ink container resides on the left side, and the other three (cyan, magenta, and yellow) reservoirs are located on the right, allowing you to check ink levels by glancing at the front of the machine. As with EcoTank models, looking at the printer is the only way to tell how much ink is left, although the printer does flash an alarm when one or more inks are critically low.
At 5.4 by 17.6 by 13 inches (HWD) with its trays closed, and weighing a slight 9.4 pounds, the Pixma G1200 is light and compact enough to sit comfortably on most desktops. And since the only connectivity it supports is USB—no Ethernet, no Wi-Fi, no Wi-Fi Direct, no near-field communication (NFC)—you’ll need to place it on your desk or someplace close to your PC. To get Wi-Fi from a MegaTank machine, you’ll have to step up to the Pixma G3200, an all-in-one without an automatic document feeder (ADF), for an additional $50. Paper capacity consists of one tray that extends from the back of the chassis and holds 100 sheets (or 20 premium photo paper sheets), and the output tray pulls out from the front. It’s worth mentioning that this Pixma supports the 5-by-5-inch photo format—inspired by Instagram, no doubt. With both trays extended, the G1200 is about half again as tall and approximately 8 inches deeper. There is no multipurpose tray for overriding the primary input source, but then removing media from the paper tray and reconfiguring it is a snap.
The Pixma G1200’s control panel consists of two buttons, Power and Cancel, and corresponding status LEDs. Canon publishes neither a maximum monthly duty cycle nor a recommended monthly volume, which is unusual. In addition, due to the lack of network connectivity, you can’t print from cloud sites without a PC, and no flash memory devices are supported.
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Setup and Software
Setup was mostly standard fare. Where it veered from the norm is that, in addition to filling the reservoirs from bottles, you must install two printheads (Canon calls them cartridges), one for black ink and one for the other three colors, into a carriage reminiscent of those used in past Pixmas that came with only two ink tanks. It’s important that you follow this part of the Getting Started guide closely; I missed a step, neglecting to remove a piece of paper covering the intakes on the cartridges, which halted the installation process—until I slowed down and figured it out. Other than that, installation was, as it is with most Pixmas, quick and simple, taking no more than 20 minutes, and that included a 6-minute initialization while the printer pumped ink from the reservoirs to the cartridges.
Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank Printer
The Canon G1200 comes with the standard consumer-grade Pixma software bundle, which includes My Image Garden and Quick Menu. (Missing is Creative Park Premium, primarily a collection of templates that requires the printer to go online.) My Image Garden is a collection of utilities, such as special effects filters, Canon’s Full HD Movie Prints (for printing frames from digital videos shot with Canon cameras), and tools for image correction and enhancement. Quick Menu is an always-on collection of icons for accessing My Image Garden features and a few other Canon options, such as ordering ink. Quick Menu is much more useful when used with an all-in-one Pixma with scanning and copying features, though.
Printing Speeds
Rated at 8.8 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 5ppm for color pages, not only is the G1200 one of the lowest-rated printers we’ve reviewed speed-wise, but it’s also one of the slowest. I tested it with PC Labs’ standard Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 that we deployed after reviewing the HP 6230 and the other machines mentioned so far; hence, comparing the G1200’s print speeds to those models’ directly isn’t practical. That said, the G1200 churned out our lightly formatted Microsoft Word text file at 7ppm, which is slower than every printer we’ve tested with our current benchmarking methodology, except for the Epson WorkForce Pro ET-16500 EcoTank All-in-One Supertank Printer ($999.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) (4.7ppm), a wide-format multifunction business printer.
See How We Test Printers
When I included our Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing color, photos, and graphics, the G1200 bogged down to 2.9ppm, this time falling behind even the ET-16500 (4.4ppm). It did print our test snapshots quickly, though. At 20 seconds to print our borderless 4-by-6-inch photos, the G1200 equaled Canon’s own consumer-grade photo printers, including the recently reviewed Canon Pixma TS9020 Wireless Inkjet All-in-One Printer.
Print Quality
Like many Pixmas, this one has exceptional print quality. Text came out dark and highly legible down to 4 points (with magnification), and even some of the more obscure decorative fonts we test looked good at smaller sizes, too. But where the G1200 excelled was in printing business graphics (charts and graphs) and especially photos. The dark backgrounds and gradients in our test documents, which many printers can’t reproduce without banding or streaking, came out nearly flawless. Our test photograph prints were the most impressive, though. When I took the time to go into the driver to set the proper paper type and the image quality to High, photos were vibrant and detailed, at least as good as I’ve seen from photo-centric Pixmas, including the six-ink MG7720 and the new TS9020.
In addition, overall print quality was higher than with the HP, Epson, and Brother models mentioned above.
Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank Printer
Running Costs
As with EcoTank printers (and INKvestment printers, though they use standard cartridges), you pay more for MegaTank products up front to compensate for a lower—in this case, much lower—per-page cost of ink. The G1200, for example, lists for $150 more than the HP 6230, but comes with enough ink to last for up to year or more (depending on how much and what you print). And replacement ink bottles are (on both a per-page and by-the-bottle basis) quite inexpensive. This is the only standalone printer that we know of designed and marketed specifically to save on running costs.
The black ink bottle holds 135 milliliters (ml) and is rated at 6,000 pages, and the three color bottles hold 70ml each, for a total of 7,000 prints, when combined with the black ink. Using these page-yield numbers and Canon’s advertised price for the bottles, the monochrome and color cost per page comes to less than 1 cent, or 0.3 cent and 0.8 cent, respectively. These numbers are similar to those of Epson’s EcoTank printers in this price range, and much lower than Brother’s INKvestment printer running costs. The Brother MFC-J985DW XL ($688.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) (a slightly more expensive—$50—all-in-one with an ADF), for example, delivers 1 cent for monochrome pages and just under 5 cents for color ones.
Conclusion
The Canon Pixma G1200, while slow, prints exceptionally and inexpensively, across the board, but at $250 it lacks many features available on competing models, such as Wi-Fi or mobile and cloud connectivity options. The nearest (in price) EcoTank and INKvestment competitors, the Epson ET-2550 and Brother MFC-J985DW XL, respectively, list for $50 more. But they are multifunction printers that support scanning and copying, as well as Wi-Fi, and nearly every other feature mentioned here, including mobile connectivity. So does the Editors’ Choice HP 6230 standalone printer, which also supports Ethernet connectivity, but has much higher running costs (3 cents for monochrome pages and 9.9 cents color). Granted, cost per page is important, but not as much on low-volume printers like these. Even so, if all you need is to print from a single PC, it’s tough to beat the Pixma G1200’s output quality and running costs—especially for printing photos.
3.5
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The Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank Inkjet Printer prints quite well, especially photos, with very reasonable running costs. But a lack of features renders it expensive when compared with competitors.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/canon-pixma-g1200-megatank-printer