It’s not often that I run across a single-function inkjet printer,
especially in the low-volume, low-price, consumer-grade photo printer
arena—where the printers themselves are relatively cheap but the ink
that drives them is sky high. And that’s the case with today’s
single-function Pixma, the $79.99 Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo
Printer.
Just as the Japanese imaging giant’s five-ink Pixma “MG”
all-in-ones (AIOs) print splendid-looking photos, so does this five-ink
single-function Pixma.
It also prints good-looking business documents,
but that’s another story, which we’ll cover below under, “Performance,
print quality, paper handling.”
Design and features
At
17.8 inches across, 14.5 inches from front to back, 5.1 inches high,
and weighing a trim 14.4 pounds, this short little single-function photo
printer won’t take up much space on your desktop, and when it is
printing, it doesn’t make a lot of noise, making it rather well-behaved
neighbor.
There’s no reason, of course, for a single-function photo printer to have an automatic document feeder (or ADF), of course—it has no scanner. In addition, this one is short on mobile connectivity features, such as Near-Field Communication (NFC), Wi-Fi Direct, and support for several cloud sites often available to most other printers nowadays.
What you do
get is support for Apple’s AirPrint, auto-duplexing for automatic
two-sided printing, CD/DVD/Blu-ray disc labeling (on appropriately
surfaced discs), and a one-year warranty with the InstantExchange
program. Then, too, there are Canon’s own utilities, such as Full HD
Movie Print for printing frames in movie clips, Fun Filter Effects, and
My Image Garden for managing images on line.
Performance, print quality, paper handling
If
you for some reason (perhaps, documents at a point-of-sale) you need a
fast printer, you should look elsewhere. If you’re looking for a photo
printer that can churn out documents at a reasonable clip, Epson’s
Small-in-One models, such as the Expression Premium XP-830 Small-in-One,
will do the trick.
Print quality, on the other hand, is another story. Photos and
documents consisting of text, business graphics, and embedded photos,
all looked quite good, with text coming very near to typesetter-quality,
and images that meet and exceed drug store-quality. That fifth ink, the
Pigment Black, goes a long ways toward correcting flaws in black and
other dark areas in photographs, in some cases greatly increasing
overall consistency.
Like most low-end Pixmas, this one has only
one input source, a 125-sheet cassette for standard paper, with an
insert inside that holds up to 20 4x6-inch sheets of quality snapshot
paper. Since all this Pixma does is print, you can’t really expect much
else.
Cost per page
As with most Pixmas,
this one supports two sizes of ink tanks, standard-yield and high-yield,
or “XL.” When you use the highest-yield cartridges for this printer,
your cost per page,
or CPP, should run about 4.6 cents for black-and-white pages and about
11.4 cents for color. These numbers don’t, however, take in to account
the Pigment Black tank’s contribution to the CPP. Unfortunately, though,
there’s no way to determine that…
The end
This
really is a niche printer. Like most photo printers, though, its
per-page cost of ink is too high for printing documents, period. Here,
with its recent drop in price to $79.99, and the machine it self’s
diminutive size, this seems like a good candidate as a second printer—a
photo printer—used only to zip off keeper photographs of the family on
vacation, or maybe some images of the latest house you took to market.
All it does is print, and it prints photos best.
By William Harrel
Printers/Scanners Expert
