Canon - MAXIFY MegaTank GX3020 Wireless All-In-One Inkjet Printer - WHITE

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• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Excellent print and scan quality

  • Top 500 Contributor
  • Tech Insider Network Member

  The overall print quality with all pigment inks is fantastic! Clearer output at best quality than the HP 2504dw Laserjet I reviewed. Text and line art are crisp and look superb. The GX2030 does a pretty job printing photos, but they are not quite as vibrant as a dye ink based printer. Also not as clean and clear when scanned with the other photos I used for this review. It’s not going to compete with a dedicated photo printer. It’s not meant to, so don’t expect it to. See photos. My review will focus on print quality and speed compared to several other printers I own and have reviewed in the past. Color differences between printers output, and explain the difference between a pigment ink and dye ink printers, and why it matters. Scanner output quality and speed. Also setup and basic settings software use. What I’m not covering is specs, features and software for printing cards and calendars. The product overview and specs covers that already. I found the setup process to be confusing and I’ve been a computer user since 1982. Usually Setting up and installing Canon software and drivers are easy and straightforward. Not in this case. There was no quick setup sheet or guide other than a paper with a CR code and link to download an app that was anything but intuitive. The app is supposed to tell you everything about setting it up starting with removing it from the box, but it’s pretty vague in the beginning. Such as removing the tape from the printer. I know that sounds like a no-brainer, but many times I have had products that wanted the tape removed in a particular order or a certain way so as not to damage something. It simply said remove tape, plug it in and turn it on. I did. Nothing. Close the app and reopen. Nothing. Still couldn’t advance to the next step with the app which the app states is the preferred way to set it up. I ended up having to do that on the printer with its tiny display with an awkward viewing angle. Then the app worked. Between being covered up at work and the time spent on this unit at home, I wasn’t the first to write a review for this product, so I read to see if others had similar issues, or was it just me. Wasn’t just me, others did too. The tiny display will timeout but the powerlight stays on in the first stage of standby. When it’s sent a print job it wakes up and starts printing. When the light goes off, it’s still on but “asleep” and not off if you set it up to be. Or you can set it to turn off after a certain amount of time without use. You will have to go into Windows Settings, Bluetooth and Devices, Printers and Scanners, select the GX2030. Then click on printing preferences, maintenance, “maintenance and preferences” and select Auto Power. There you can set up auto power off and whether it’s in standby when off and will wake from a dead sleep. The tiny monochrome display is adequate for settings and such but the angle is fixed as is the contrast. It can be hard to read depending on how high the printer is sitting and how tall you are. Scanning to a PC via WiFi was only slightly slower than a USB connection. Same for scanning to print from the printer itself. Scan quality when scanning in photo mode is excellent. When scanning color with the Document setting, it cranks up the contrast. This is fine for text and mostly text documents, but not for documents with photos. It can make any embedded photos in said document look very contrasty. Meaning extreme black shadows and blown highlights. Gradients will not be smooth either. You can tweak the settings in the software for the dedicated buttons’ settings to get the results you want via the Settings Button / Menu. If you’re scanning a document with a photo in it, I’d recommend scanning it as a photo for the best results. However, you cannot save a photo scan as a PDF like you can using Document Button using the Photo Button. Use Custom Scan if you want to make a one click button with highly specialized settings. Then you can save photos to a PDF file. TO me this device is designed primarily for printing with scanning and copying as add ons for convenience. It hits the target for that purpose. If you plan on doing a lot of scanning you might want to consider the GX3020’s sibling with an auto feeder for scanning or a dedicated document scanner that can do scans much faster like 2 seconds for a 6X4 photo at 300 DPI and batch them out as individual files. Scan times (all letter size) USB connection: 300 DPI to PDF text document: 13 seconds, 300 DPI photo.jpg: 14 seconds, 600 DPI photo.jpg: 48 seconds Scan times (all letter size) via WiFi: 300 DPI to PDF text document: 20 seconds, 300 DPI photo.jpg: 17 seconds, 600 DPI photo.jpg: 51 seconds. The Maxify GX3020 uses all pigment ink and that is why the print quality is so good. Deep blacks for text and solid colors for graphics. However, photos can look a little flat or dull when using pigment ink. Dye ink is generally more vibrant than pigment ink. (see photos) Pigment ink is a fine powder suspended in liquid whereas dye is all liquid. The photo paper you use can make a difference in how the colors render too. Dye or pigment, but more so with dye ink. Same for “plain paper”. Copier paper will work in an inkjet printer but won’t look as good as paper meant for an inkjet printer. Here’s why. Copier paper is thinner and the ink will bleed more on it. Dye or pigment. A laser printer or copier uses a powder called toner that is fixed to the paper with heat and doesn’t bleed. Paper for inkjet printers is slightly thicker and can have a coating to prevent bleeding. So, if you need extra sharpness use inkjet paper. All text and graphics were printed on plain copy paper on all printers used in this review. This is what kind of paper most people will probably be using because it’s the least expensive. Time to wake from sleep and print a double sided page with text and photos at standard quality was 42 seconds. Times will vary depending on what’s on each page and the print quality selected. Best quality will take longer. For photos it’s pretty good, but they do not look as vibrant as with dye based printers. Especially when printing skin tones. Photos look a little bit dull. All my testing was with default settings, so you can probably tweak the settings for better results. You have three 3 output quality settings for general printing and 2 for photos. Lower settings use less ink and print in lower resolutions. The ink bottles do say setup on them and it uses some of that ink to fill the supply tubes to the printhead, the small reservoirs in the printhead assembly and to prime the printhead. It discharges excess ink used to flush the printheads into what’s called a maintenance box which is user replaceable. The setup color bottles have 67 ml, whereas the replacement bottles have 132 ml. That’s about 10 times more ink than what is in a typical Canon ink tank and way more ink than in a multi color tank like on the TR-150 that uses a CL-36 multi color tank with about 4 ml per color. I used the Standard setting for text and graphics and High for photos. All photos were printed on Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II on all the printers used for this review. Print quality compared to a few other printers I have: Epson EcoTank ET-3700 all in one: The GX3020 easily beats the print quality of this 5 year old printer in the text and graphics department. However, the ET-3700 does better with printing photos when it comes to skin tones. But all of it’s photos lack contrast. Scanner quality is about the same but the ET-3700 scans a letter size photo in about 50 seconds at 600 DPI via WiFi. Same goes for making copies as a stand alone device. Canon Pixma TR-150 printer: The TR uses a pigment ink tank for text and a CMYK dye ink tank for everything else. I think it uses the black pigment ink for photos too but can’t confirm that. It’s pretty much on par with the GX3020 in print quality but the GX3020 edges it out when printing lines, like a mechanical breakdown. However, the TR-150 does a better job at photos. Best of the 3 for photos. See photos. HP LaserJet Tank 2504dw printer: For black text and line art only, they are about on par for text, but the GX3020 beats it in sharpness and detail. I was a little surprised at that. The HP wins for print speed. See Photos. Conclusion: For text and graphics this is the best inkjet printer I have ever tested and I have owned a lot since the late 1990s. Scan speed is slightly faster with a direct USB connection then WiFi. Superb build quality. Much cheaper to feed it ink in the long run than little disposable tanks. The only negative was that the setup was unintuitive and a pain. Highly recommended!!

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  Posted 2 years ago by MrLowNotes

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  What beats a laser?

  • Top 500 Contributor
  • Tech Insider Network Member

  Laser printers are fast, quiet and print quality photos. I have tested very various ridiculous photos on regular paper and they've all seemingly come out fantastic. That's just the beginning. Connecting directly to a computer with printing cable will allow you to scan at will and send directly to your computer or laptop. Scanning is simple printing is simple, set up is even simple. I first set it up with my phone and then turned around and set it up with my desktop computer and it was all simple, fast and easy. Furthermore, the ink tanks. For whatever reason, I had an entirely different idea of what this consisted of, but it's actually pretty cool. Number one. It is color and numerically coated so no way of actually getting it wrong. But do be careful. The little connecting latches can have you put a vat of ink in the wrong tank. But there are latches on the printer and on the bottles themselves that allow for a perfect connection and a perfect poor no spilling and no chance of getting it all over the place. You almost have to try to screw it all the way up. I am very partial to laser printers and I'm very fun of this one in particular. Highly recommended

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  Posted 2 years ago by claggtastic

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  It's so great! But setup was not!

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  CONS: I honestly stumbled a bunch during the set up. I decided to not fall back on my IT knowledge and just do what the box and app said to do. The first thing I found when unboxing it was a piece of paper that told to do is either go to a website or scan a QR code for the "Canon Print" app. I choose the app method since I assumed more people would use this method. On that same paper it says "Follow the instructions on the website" then "Connect to a computer or website". Simply enough I thought, "3 steps on the paper, easy peasy", but I was slightly mistaken. Getting the app was a pretty easy process, but as soon as I fired up the app it confused me. I opted to select "Add a new printer" and followed the instructions... this is the beginning of my minor problems. It IMMEDIATELY started searching for a printer. No "push this button to get it discoverable", no "Connect printer to WiFi", no nothing, just immediately started searching for the printer. At this point it just sat there searching for the printer and did nothing. I hit the question mark next to the searching text, but it just said make sure WiFi is working and the printer is on WiFi and restart it. I thought to myself, you haven't told me how to get it on WiFi yet!!! But there was an oversight on my part that I didn't realize the first time around. More on that later. I then said this isn't going to work, and opted to go to the website version instead on my Windows PC. Basically did the same thing, it immediately started looking for a printer. Except this time it had me download a Windows Store app; the "Canon Inkjet Smart Connect" app. There were updates it ran in the middle of it after it installed, but all pretty standard stuff. To my dismay, it started searching for a printer right away... ugh... here we go again I thought. But what made the Windows app more intuitive than the iPhone version was the BIG, gigantic next screen that says "Start your printer connection" and giving you an option of how to get your printer going... Ah now we're getting somewhere, choose WiFi and then it said to push the link button for a few seconds and blamo, got it on WiFi and was off to the races. Easy! I wanted to use the iPhone app as soon as I launched it, it found the printer right away. I then added it and it was good. I thought to myself, maybe I missed something. Deleted everything and factory reset the printer and tried again with the iPhone version. Sure enough at the very bottom of the discovery page, it says, "If Printer Cannot be Found" around a border. I didn't notice it the first time around, pushing that and it started to link everything the same way. So I guess if I were to complain, I'd say make the iPhone app a little more intuitive and perhaps after a few, flash the button or go to the next screen saying setup up connection. PROS: I had concerns about how to pour the ink without making a mess. But the ink pouring process is so easy. It was very cleverly designed. I didn't spill a drop. Printed some images on standard paper and I was surprised how good it looked. There was an optional calibration that happened before the first print. I choose to do this and I'm glad I did. Pages come out pretty quick, and black ink in gray scale looks darker than what I'd typically see Ink printers do. What I love about the printer over some competing brands is having each color separate and it being a pour method. Though I never ran out during my testing (because they give you full ink first rather than starter ink) I could easily tell what's low and what isn't. So getting a refill would be pretty easy honestly. I am curious how to handle doing a partial fill. I didn't notice anywhere advising against it, but I'm hoping it just stops pouring when it hits the full mark. Kind of like how your gas tank does when you fill your tank in your car. If it does that, easily the best printer on the market IMO.

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  Posted 2 years ago by GamingBusinessGuy