Canon PIXMA MG6120 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-in-One Printer (4503B002)

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Canon PIXMA MG6120 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-in-One Printer (4503B002) Review

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Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)

Pros:
Effortless set up, even for WiFi
Excellent print and photographic quality
High quality scanning
Faster than older Canon inkjet printers
Slick interface/modern design
Buffed up Canon software
Front loading paper tray
Excellent customer support (see addendum)

Cons:
Memory card reader on WiFi works for Windows but not for Mac
Slow wireless 'upload' from printer
Shiny exterior picks up fingerprints
Completely redesigned ink cartridges means that you are stuck with expensive, proprietary
ones, at least for the time being
No continuous document feed
Long install time for proprietary software
Canon software is much better, but still a little slow and clunky
No printer functions will work (including scanning) if there is a missing or malfunctioning ink cartridge

The PIXMA MG6120 is one of Cannon's newest line of printers. It is long on features and really is an excellent, all around printer for home use. It was easy to set up using the supplied CD and worked without a hitch on WiFi immediately on set up. The text printing on normal paper is excellent and the photographic reproduction is nearly photo-lab comparable.

Note: I am using the printer on an Apple iMac with a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (for the truly savvy, this is a 17" MA590LL/A, late 2007 model). I am running OS X 10.6.4 on the Mac side and Windows 7 home edition on Bootcamp. The printer that I am comparing this model to, is my old Canon MX310[Canon Pixma MX310 Office All-in-One Inkjet Printer (2184B002)], bought from Amazon circa 2007.

WHAT'S IN THE BOX:
The printer is packaged with a quick start up guide, network trouble shooting guide, a starter pack of 6 ink cartridges, power cord, paper for print head alignment, and sample pack of 4 X 6 Canon Plus Glossy II photo paper. Extricating the printer from its box was par for the course, with the usual removal of protective wrapping and unsticking of orange tape.

The printer itself weighs in at 20 lbs, so it is somewhat more hefty than it looks and it is by no means petite at 18.6 x 14.5 x 6.9 inches. It sports a small view screen and innovative touch panel that functioned smoothly. It has a pleasing, modern design, and a glossy finish that really looks cool at first, but is a real magnet for fingerprints.

SET UP:
You hardly need a manual to tell you what to do, as the printer really tells you what to do itself once you turn it on. The carriage centers as you open the device and placing the print head in place is easy. The ink cartridges are color coded and fit in place easily. There is a thick, black cartridge that can only fit in one space, but the color cartridges are otherwise identical. They will fit into each other's slots, but there is a guide on the print head that makes placement a no brainer. As each cartridge is equipped with its own microchip, my guess is that the printer would inform you of any errors in placement. Not wanting to mess up the color printing for the first runs, I stuck with the program and didn't let the machine prime the ink tanks while placed in the wrong slots. Once closed, the machine quickly cleans the print heads and then prompts you to place the photographic paper in the back loading slot for print head alignment. A few minutes later, this is done. Plain paper can then be loaded in the front cassette or in the rear loading slot, and you're off to the races.

WARNING!: A word about the ink tanks--these are a brand new style. This means that it will be some time before refurbished or third party cartridges are available for use. Although brand new Canon ink cartridges are likely to function the best, other options do significantly decrease the price per page and not everyone needs 100% full quality prints or an archival photo that will not fade in `300 years.' You can get an idea of ink prices here: Canon PGI-225 BK/ CLI-226 C,M,Y 4 Pack Value Pack (4530B008); Canon CLI-226 Gray Ink Tank (4550B001). Note that at the time that I am writing this there is no value pack that covers all of the MG6120 inks together. Unlike other Canon photo printers you will need the PGI-225 black and FOUR CLI-226 cartridges (C,M,Y, and GRAY). At present prices, refilling the ink tanks twice would cost about as much as buying a brand new MG6120 at Amazon's sale price. To my knowledge, no 3rd party refill kits or refurbished cartridges are available at this time.)

UPDATE 1/15/2011: Generic inks are now becoming available for the printer. But so far, caveat emptor. I purchased these 6 PKS GENERIC INK CANON PGI-225 CLI-226 Pixma iP4820 MG5220 at a bargain basement price but--as always--there's a catch. The cartridges do NOT come with cartridge recognition chips--the printer WILL NOT RUN unless the chips are in place. The instructions tell you how to transfer the chips from your existing OEM cartridges to a plastic device called a 'chip extender.' Once you understand how to do this it isn't exactly rocket science but lets just say that there's a learning curve here and only 1/6 cartridges were recognized by my printer. I will be contacting the company and trying to figure out where things went wrong and re-updated the review, but at this juncture I CANNOT recommend these cartridges. My guess is that either the chip extender isn't lining the chip up correctly, I glued the chips on to the chip extender incorrectly, or I damaged the chip in the process of moving it. The cartridges themselves DO look like the real thing and appear to be compatible in all other ways. Unless you have experience with such things, I would avoid these. Canvassing the net, there now appear to be some vendors (ones certified by the BBB) that are producing compatible or refurbished cartridges (WITH chips). The only cartridge that doesn't seem to be available this way so far is the grey cartridge, but I imagine that this will soon be available.

UPDATE 7/12/2011
FYI, there are now places where you can get non-OEM cartridges with working chips. Recently, I purchased these: LD � Canon PGI225 & CLI226 Compatible Set of 14 Ink Cartridges: 4 Pigment Black PGI225, 2 each of CLI226 B/C/M/Y/G and so far they are working well. This is by no means the only source for non-OEM cartridges, but it's right here on Amazon. There are also other sources for these cartridges that can be found on the web. These come with working chips that monitor the ink levels and worked flawlessly with the printer.

The compatible cartriges give you twice as many cartridges as the Canon OEM for less than half the price (Compare this to Canon PGI-225 BK/ CLI-226 C,M,Y 4 Pack Value Pack (4530B008) in Retail Packaging and add in the Gray Canon CLI-226 Gray Ink Tank (4550B001)). Remember, generic cartridges do not have the same guarantee that they will work with a printer and often do not have the same quality control as OEMs. Moreover, the ink inside the cartridges may not be of the same quality.

If you decide to go the way of non-OEM cartridges, make sure that you use a reputable vendor. Also, as noted above, I would recommend avoiding cartridges that do not come with chips. They may be somewhat cheaper in the short run, but having the chips already installed on the cartridge makes life easier in the long run.

THE SOFTWARE:
Loading the software was similarly easy on both OS X or Windows. The supplied CD easily installs the software with a few simple prompts. In both cases, however, the basic software can take up to 10 minutes to load. On Windows, the printer is picked up and is automatically added with a click. On the Mac side, the software is similarly easy to install, but you have to supply the WiFi network password to add the printer.

The present Canon software is definitely an upgrade from the previous generation. The main screen gives you options for photo printing, calender printing, layout printing, album printing, and movie printing (this feature only works with Canon cameras). The photo print option is the most useful and allows you to print single photographs or a number of photographs on a single sheet of paper. Scanner options include autoscan, OCR (optical character recognition), attaching scans to emails, and opening of saved images. There are also options for web services, help/settings, and product information.

None of the software really represents a real photo editor, and, truthfully, most people have their favorites anyway. Nevertheless, there are some basic photo editing features such as red eye reduction, face sharpening, face smoothing, blemish correction, and brightness/contrast/sharpness/blur controls. But these are painfully slow on both the Mac and in Windows. Unless you are doing something very simple, you'll want to use your photo editor of choice.

The scanner interface is much improved from previous generations. In particular, the auto scan feature quickly detects what you are scanning and accurately recognizes if there are different pictures, and saves them as multiple files . Manual controls are similarly easy to use. The OCR is much improved from their 2007 vintage, and is reasonably accurate across different typefaces.

PRINTING TEXT:
Printing text is both faster and better than in the previous model. When magnified, it is clear that the text from this printer is sharper and cleaner than the MX310. That being said, when viewed under normal conditions at zero magnification, I'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. Both are certainly acceptable. On the bright side, the MG6120 is almost twice as fast.

PRINTING PICTURES:
I was quite impressed by the MG6120's photo quality. Although this is an all-in-one, it has the capability for near photo-lab quality. With a maximum 9600 x 2400 DPI, there is no visible pixillation to the naked eye when printing a high resolution photo. The colors are true and the blacks are consistently deep black without that line by line variation that is all too common in inkjet printers. The upload to the printer over WiFi did cause a short lag, but this was more than acceptable, even at high resolution. There is a definite advantage in having six, separate tanks of ink rather than four, in terms of producing true colors. I did not show a sample comparing the MG6120 with the MX310 as I ran out of Canon color cartridges for the MX310 and I didn't think that using a refurbished cartridge would be a fair comparison. However, I would never have thought of using the MX310 to print pictures for more than casual use. Even when new, the MX310 had too high a level of artifact to produce photo album quality pictures. The MG6120 may not be a professional level photo printer, but it rivals many online consumer photo print services.

The biggest surprise was the ability of the MG6120 to produce quality black and white photographs. Given the true, deep blacks and the addition of that extra gray tank of ink, the B&W photos have an incredible richness that comes through. I have printed a sample from both printers and it is clear that the MG6120 trumps the MX310 in terms of the level of detail of the picture, the contrast between dark blacks and whites, and the subtle shades of gray in between.

[Note: I uploaded images of Lucy the Elephant to show differences between black and white print quality. Please realize a few important things: 1) I printed both photos on the supplied, 4x6, Cannon Glossy II paper on each printer; 2) I then scanned them using the MG6120; 3)To transfer the photos to Amazon, the TIFF file had to be converted to a JPEG; 4) Amazon seems to shrink the pictures down to size after upload anyway. Suffice it to say you lose a lot of resolution in the process, which actually makes the pretty awful print from the MX310 look acceptable. The MG6120 produces a dark black, without the usual uneven, streakiness you see with ink jet printers. The balance of the grays was true to the original photo. The print was nice enough to frame. In contrast the MX310 produced uneven blacks and the mid-tones were dull and washed out. Visible streaking on the photo meant made it unacceptable for even casual use.]

SCANS/COPYING:
All the pictures for this review were scanned on the printer. I believe that it produces a high quality scan (the resolution is purported to be 4800 x 4800). All the images for this review were scanned using the machine. Scanning times are quick and the software makes scanning quite simple. One caveat is that there is no feeder tray for continuous scanning, so all scanning has to be done manually. Clearly, this is not the unit to get if you have to scan a lot of pages. The copy quality of the printer is similarly excellent and is also speedy for an all-in-one.

Canon also fixed an OS X driver glitch: when using the MX310 I was unable to switch between scanning and printing (or vice versa) without getting an error saying that the device was in use. In order to switch I had to restart the computer. You can now switch easily between printer and scanner without any errors.

OTHER FEATURES:
There are numerous slots for media cards and a place to connect a thumb drive or device via USB. In Windows, I was able to access the information on the connected drive wirelessly via the software and print directly this way. On the Mac, I couldn't seem to find the connected card or device--a clear error in the OS X software component. Either way, the download to the computer over WiFi took a considerable amount of time, given that the printer supposedly communicates via wireless n, this was surprising. Just getting the photo thumbnails to show on the computer within the Canon software program took a long time. So if you want to print via the software, it's better to upload the pictures to your computer via a cable first and then use the software. That being said, the upload to the printer has a mild delay, but is much, much faster. It makes me think that this is some kind of software or hardware glitch that may be worked out in the future.)

The printer is also capable of printing without being attached to a computer. The small screen on the printer has a number of printing features available. That being said, it is not always the easiest thing to navigate through and I found it much easier to use the computer with the software. Still, in a pinch this is a nice feature. Being able to do layout prints, print an ID photo, and stickers directly from your printer is a major plus in my book. The printer can even print PDF files from a USB drive without access to a computer--a really nice touch.

SUMMARY:
This is a capable and easy to use all-in-one that would work well as a home printer. Unlike many all-in-one printers, it seems to perform all of its functions--print, scan, and copy. There are mostly pluses here and few minuses. That being said, for the pure text printer, a laser printer will probably print faster for a lower price per page. And for the advanced photo buff or professional, will need a dedicated photographic printer for that perfect work of art. But for the rest of us the MG6120 is a jack of all trades and master of most.

ADDENDUM 2/28/2010
Near the end of January, my original printer cartridges were empty. In an effort to save money I ordered these non-OEM cartridges:[...] (I am using the web address because I can no longer find this using the insert product link button). These did not come with their own chips, and after spending much time prying off the chips from my original cartridges and gluing them in place, all but one cartridge failed to be recognized by the printer. This rendered the printer useless (not even the scanning function will work with unrecognized cartridges).

I ran out to 3 separate brick and mortar stores for OEM replacement cartridges--these cartridges are new and none of the stores had the full complement of cartridges. The rarest of cartridges in this regard was the CLI-226 Gray cartridge, which is only used on the new, higher-end, photo printers. After placing the OEM cartridges into the carriage, they were still not recognized.

I called Canon customer support and they walked me through the process from start to finish. They were polite and took about 30 minutes on the phone with me troubleshooting the printer. I was also assured that if a cartridge didn't work that they would send out a replacement and if they couldn't get the printer to work that they would exchange the printer for me! In the end, alls well that ends well. The cartridges were recognized and the printer hummed to life.

This kind of customer support is quite rare in the fast world of technology and in my estimation really adds value to this printer in a big way. Hats off to Canon for their careful attention to their customers.
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