Canon G1220 Printer: In-Depth Review and User Opinions

The Canon G1220 is an ink tank printer designed for high volume printing at ultra-low costs. This printer uses Canon's MegaTank ink system which features supersized integrated ink tanks instead of replaceable cartridges. The G1220 can print up to 7000 black pages or 6000 color pages with the included set of inks, allowing you to print thousands of pages before needing a refill.

With its integrated ink tanks, the G1220 eliminates the need to frequently replace cartridges. This is a game-changer for home offices, families, and small businesses that do a lot of printing. The G1220 delivers an extremely low cost per page - around 1 cent per color page and 0.3 cents per black page. The savings add up quick when you're printing high volumes.

Overall, the Canon G1220 is built for people who need to print a lot without breaking the bank on ink. Keep reading this review to learn more about the design, print quality, features, and performance of this budget-friendly ink tank printer.

Design

The Canon G1220 has a clean, stylish design that will look great in any home office or small business. It measures 14.7 x 13.0 x 7.3 inches and weighs just 16.1 pounds, so it has a relatively compact footprint without sacrificing functionality.

Despite its small size, the printer comes in two classic Canon colors - black and white. So you can choose the color that best matches your workspace's aesthetic. The angular lines give it a modern, minimalist look. The top is made of smooth plastic with a matte finish that resists fingerprints or smudges.

Overall, the printer's dimensions and color options allow it to seamlessly blend into your desktop setup. It strikes the perfect balance between taking up minimal space while still offering robust print capabilities.

Print Quality

The Canon G1220 delivers excellent print quality for both photos and documents. It has a max print resolution of 4800 x 1200 dpi, producing sharp text and vivid, detailed photos.

The printer uses Canon's MegaTank ink system with integrated ink tanks instead of cartridges. This allows for extremely low-cost printing, around 1 cent per color page and 5 cents for a black and white page. The ink bottles can print up to 6,000 color pages or 14,000 black pages before needing a refill.

Print speeds are decent but not blazing fast. For black and white documents, it can print 10 pages per minute. For color documents and photos, it prints 7.7 ppm. While not the fastest home printer available, the print speeds are very reasonable for the price.

Overall, the print quality is superb, especially for photos. Fine details and smooth color gradients are rendered beautifully. Text is crisply defined, making this printer suitable for both photos and document printing needs. When you combine the excellent print quality with the ultra-low ink costs, it's easy to see why this printer gets rave reviews.

Connectivity

The Canon G1220 offers convenient connectivity options for your home or office setup. It comes equipped with built-in wireless and wired networking capabilities.

Wired Connectivity

The printer has an ethernet port that allows you to connect it directly to your router or network switch with an ethernet cable. This provides a fast and reliable wired connection for sharing the printer on your local network.

Wireless Connectivity

For wireless networking, the G1220 supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n connectivity. You can connect it to your WiFi network and print from anywhere in your home without cables. It's compatible with 2.4GHz networks.

Mobile Printing

In addition to standard wired and wireless connectivity, the G1220 also offers mobile device printing. You can print directly from your smartphone or tablet using the Canon Print app. The printer supports Apple AirPrint for iOS devices and Mopria Print Service for Android. This gives you printing flexibility when on the go.

Overall, the connectivity options on the Canon G1220 provide simple setup and convenience whether printing from your computer or mobile devices. The wireless and wired networking allow you to place the printer anywhere in your home or office and print from multiple devices.

Paper Handling

The Canon G1220 has solid paper handling capabilities. It has a 250-sheet plain paper cassette that can hold various paper types including plain paper, photo paper, envelopes and more. The rear tray can hold 100 sheets of plain paper.

The main cassette has a maximum paper size of 8.5 x 14 inches, while the rear tray can print on sizes up to 8.5 x 23 inches. Both trays support media weights from 17 lb bond to 28 lb bond.

The printer also has a dedicated photo paper tray that can hold 20 sheets of 4 x 6 inch photo paper. This allows you to easily print high quality photos without having to swap out the paper in the main tray.

Overall, with 350 sheets of input capacity and support for a wide variety of paper types and sizes, the G1220 has very flexible paper handling to meet home and home office printing needs. The addition of a dedicated photo tray is a nice bonus not found on many other printers in this class.

Scanning

The Canon G1220 printer comes with a built-in scanner that makes copying and digitizing documents fast and easy. It has an optical resolution of 1200 x 2400 dpi, allowing you to capture fine details and crisp text in scanned documents.

The scanner can handle documents up to 8.5 x 11.7 inches in size, which is suitable for most home office needs. It supports common file formats like JPEG, TIFF, BMP, and PDF. Scanning is done through the printer's 2.7 inch color LCD screen, allowing you to preview documents before saving them.

Some handy scanning features include the ability to scan to email, scan to cloud services like Dropbox, and scan to devices over WiFi. The printer also supports auto scan mode, which automatically crops and deskews documents to optimize the scanned file. Overall, the scanning functionality is robust for a home printer in this price range.

Copying

The Canon G1220 is quite fast at copying, able to churn out 21 black and white copies per minute. This beats many competitors in its class like the Epson ET-5850, which maxes out at 15 copies per minute.

The duplexer allows you to easily copy double sided originals and produce double sided copies automatically. You can copy multiple page documents and collate the pages, so it doesn't just stack pages 1 from the whole stack for instance. This is very handy for copying larger documents or booklets while retaining the correct page order.

Overall the Canon G1220 offers excellent copy speeds, convenient double sided copying, and helpful collating features that make it stand out for home office use where copying documents is a regular need. The auto duplexing and collating allow it to neatly and quickly reproduce booklets, reports, presentations and more.

Cost Per Page

The Canon G1220 is designed to be an ultra low-cost inkjet printer. The main way it achieves such low printing costs is through its high capacity ink tanks.

Instead of using standard ink cartridges that need to be frequently replaced, the G1220 has integrated ink reservoirs that you manually refill with bottles of ink. A single set of inks can print up to 7,700 pages in black and 6,000 pages in color.

The included bottles provide enough ink to print approximately 6,000 pages in black and 8,000 pages in color. Replacement ink bottles cost around $17 for black and $13 for each color.

To put this in perspective, if you print 300 pages per month, 50% in black and 50% in color, the ink would last you 20 months before needing a refill, costing around $3 per month in ink.

Compared to a standard inkjet printer which might cost $50-60 for a black cartridge yielding 600 pages, and $35-40 for a color cartridge yielding 400 pages, the G1220 brings ink costs down by 10 times or more.

So for medium to high volume printing needs, the initial investment in the G1220 pays for itself over time through massive savings on ink.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Very low printing costs. With high-yield ink tanks, this printer can print thousands of pages for just pennies per page. Much more economical than standard inkjet printers over the long run.

• Excellent print quality for both documents and photos. It uses a 5-color ink system to produce vibrant, detailed prints. Prints are water-resistant too.

• Automatic 2-sided printing helps save paper.

• Large touchscreen makes it easy to navigate menus and preview photos.

• Compact size saves space.

Cons

• No ADF for scanning/copying multiple pages. You have to feed pages one by one.

• Slow print speed. It maxes out at about 8 pages per minute for black and 4 pages per minute for color. Not ideal for high volume printing.

• Lack of wireless connectivity. It connects only via USB. No built-in WiFi.

• No support for printing from cloud services or mobile devices.

• Relatively small 100-sheet tray capacity. You may have to refill paper more frequently.

Conclusion

The Canon G1220 MegaTank printer provides an economical option for high volume printing needs for home office use. With its large ink reservoirs that provide up to 6,000 black pages or 7,700 color pages per ink bottle set, it offers an ultra-low cost per page to maximize your ink savings.

The G1220 delivers decent print speeds and connectivity options like wireless printing and scanning. It produces good quality output for everyday documents and photos. The lack of an LCD may be inconvenient for some users.

Overall, the Canon G1220 is a great budget-friendly printer suitable for home office use, students, and small businesses that need to print frequently at a low operating cost. It’s easy to set up, use and maintain. For those whose priority is to minimize ink costs for high volume printing, the Canon G1220 represents excellent value.