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All-in-one (AIO) printers like the Canon Pixma TS7720 ($149.99) take a lot of flak for high ink costs and a two-cartridge design that forces you to throw out any unused ink when you run out of a single color. But there’s a good a reason they still exist. They let you spend relatively little on the printer, and for those who need only occasional, light-duty printing, the total cost of printer and ink over the printer’s lifetime can still be less than for a more expensive printer with similar features but cheaper ink. In other words, if you have to print, but not a lot of pages and not too often, the TS7720 can be worth considering at its low list price. If you find it at a discount, even better. Design: Small Enough for Your DeskThe TS7720 weighs 13.8 pounds, making it easy to move into place, and it measures 6.7 by 14.8 by 13.8 inches (HWD) with the trays closed, making it small enough to find room for even if space is tight. Setup consists of little more than plugging it in, inserting the black and color ink cartridges, letting it run its fully automated alignment routine, then downloading and installing the driver and other software.
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Connection options are limited to Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and USB, which I used for testing. You can also download Canon’s mobile app to your Android or iOS phone or tablet for mobile printing and scanning. One unusual extra is that you can set the 2.7-inch touch-screen control panel to one of four “scenes” with quick access to the features you use the most (see the screenshots below).
(Credit: Canon/M. David Stone)
Paper handling for printing is better than for many printers in this price range, starting with two trays that between them can hold up to 200 sheets of paper—100 of up to letter-size paper in the front drawer, and 100 of up to legal-size paper in the rear tray. And because the rear tray is easy to empty and refill, it’s a cinch to switch between different types or sizes of paper if you need to. The rear tray is also the only choice for feeding photo paper. Both trays support automatic duplexing, though not for legal-size paper.
Canon doesn’t include a maximum or recommended monthly duty cycle for printing in its website specs, but if you want to keep paper refills down to roughly one a week, the 200-sheet capacity translates to 800 sheets a month. That’s well past the point where it will become cheaper to choose a costlier printer with less-expensive ink.
(Credit: Canon)
For scanning and copying, the paper handling capacity limits the TS7720 to strictly light-duty use. The lack of an automatic document feeder (ADF) means the only way to scan is by manually placing the pages on the letter-size platen one at time. Despite its limitations, however, the ability to scan at all can be a useful convenience if you don’t scan very often, and rarely scan documents longer than a page or two.Any calculated ink cost per page for the TS7720 has even more of an error range than with most printers, because when any of the three ink colors (cyan, yellow, and magenta) runs out, you have to replace the color cartridge and toss whatever is left of the other two color inks. That said, based on the cost of the high-capacity cartridges, the numbers work out to 7.6 cents per standard black page and 19 cents per standard color page.
(Credit: Canon)
Alternatively, if you take advantage of any of the variations of Canon’s Pixma Print Plan, Canon says you can save 20% to 70% on ink. As with most ink subscription plans, the costs are the same for mono and color pages, and they’re also the same regardless of how much ink is on the page. So you’ll generally save more if you print a lot of full-page color graphics and photos. But keep in mind that you will pay the full price each month, even if you don’t print any pages, so pick a tier carefully. (You can also carry over unused pages to the next month to some extent. For more details, check out Canon’s site and our story on tank printers and ink plans.) Canon also offers a Pay as You Go plan, but at 20 cents per page, it won’t save any money unless you put more ink on almost every sheet than a standard mono or color test page uses.Testing the Pixma TS7720: Slow, But Worth Waiting ForFor judging the TS7720’s performance in context, I chose inkjets with similar list prices to compare with: the Epson Expression Home XP5200, the Epson WorkForce WF-2960, and the Brother MFC-J4335DW, our current Editors’ Choice pick for personal and micro office AIOs. As the name suggests, the XP5200 is the most focused on home use in this group. It’s also the only one of the three that, as with the TS7720, lacks an ADF for scanning.On our business applications suite, the MFC-J4335DW came in first across the board.
The two Epson models were essentially tied for second place, though they weren’t far off first place for the Word file, at 14ppm (52 seconds) compared with 15ppm (49 seconds) for the Brother printer. That leaves the TS7720 as the definitively slowest printer in the group for every file.
Relative performance was the same for duplex printing, using the same Word file.
For printing 4-by-6-inch photos, the TS7720 averaged 32 seconds each, making it faster for photos than most inkjets are.Text quality was a step below top-tier for an inkjet, but not by much. All of the fonts in our test suite that you’d likely use in a business document were easily readable at 5 points, and half of them were easily readable at 4 points. A look through a loupe showed that the problem for those that were hard to read at 4 points was a combination of uneven line widths and gaps in some strokes. One of the two fonts with heavy strokes was easily readable at 12 points, while the one that’s easier to render well was reasonably well formed and highly readable at 8 points.Using default settings for graphics on plain paper, darker colors tended to look a little muddy, but fills using black or bright colors were nicely saturated and punchy. I saw some banding on most full-page graphics, which varied from subtle to obvious, but wasn’t overly distracting even when most obvious. Thin lines, including a one-pixel-wide line on a black background, held well, solid fills were suitably solid (except for the already mentioned banding), and most gradients were nicely shaded, the exception being in a gray gradient that’s hard to print well, which showed a hint of posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually). Photos on Canon’s recommended Photo Paper Plus Glossy II were all at the high end of drugstore-level quality.
(Credit: Canon)
On our water resistance tests, both black and color ink on plain paper smudged slightly. However, I didn’t see any smudging when highlighting text on plain paper. On photo paper, I didn’t see any smudging on either black or color ink, but I did see water stains after drying.Verdict: A Good Option for Printing Occasionally The Canon Pixma TS7720’s key shortcoming as far as features are concerned is the lack of an ADF. If you want an AIO printer that includes one, consider the Brother MFC-J4335DW or Epson WF-2960. Between them, the Brother model delivers a faster speed but a little worse output quality overall than the other models mentioned here, and it’s a tank printer, which translates to having the lowest running cost of the group. The Epson model’s overall output quality is just a small step down from the TS7720’s quality, but it was a few seconds faster on every file in our tests.If you don’t need an ADF, be sure to also consider the Epson XP-5200, which offers a close match to the WF-2960 for speed and output quality, plus a lower list price—and at this writing a lower price on Amazon—than the TS7720. It also uses a separate ink cartridge for each color, so you won’t have to throw out any unused ink. All that said, the TS7720 is a strong contender. It’s a little slow compared with the other three mentioned here, but it offers the best output quality (particularly for text and photos), it delivered fast speed for photos in testing, and its two paper trays give it the best paper handing for printing in this group. Any one of these strengths could be enough to make it your preferred choice.
Pros
Prints, scans, and copies
Automatic duplexing for printing
Two paper trays
Supports mobile printing and scanning
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Cons
No automatic document feeder for scanning
Limited to scanning letter-size paper or smaller
Lowest running cost requires ink subscription
The Bottom Line
The Canon Pixma TS7720 all-in-one printer is best suited for light-duty use in a home or home office, where it’ll serve nicely despite its potentially high running cost.
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