Canon Pixma MG5520 BK Wireless Inkjet Photo All-In-One Printer

Pros Slightly above-par photo and text quality. 5 ink tanks. Fast photo printing. Mobile printing features galore.

Cons Screen is non-touch. Slow at office printing. Lacks port for USB thumb drive. Lacks memory-card reader. Bottom Line The Canon Pixma MG5520 Wireless Photo All-in-One Printer has a rather sparse feature set, but offers good photo and text quality at a reasonable price.

By Tony Hoffman

The Canon Pixma MG5520 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-in-One Printer is very similar in form to the Canon Pixma MG7120 Wireless Photo All-in-One Printer that Canon introduced at the same time, with a few differences. The MG5520 is matte black while the Canon MG7120 is glossy. The MG5520's LCD screen is non-touch, controlled by physical buttons. And the MG5520 lacks the MG7120's memory-card reader. The Canon MG7120 adds a sixth ink tank to the MG5520's five. They both share above-average photo quality, and the MG7120 was slightly faster at printing photos.

The MG5520 prints, copies, and scans. It measures 5.9 by 18 by 14.6 inches (HWD), and weighs 12.1 pounds. The paper feeder, which can fit up to 100 sheets of plain paper or up to 20 sheets of photo paper as small as 4 by 6 instead, is in front, below the output tray. On top of the printer is the letter-sized flatbed.

The 2.5-inch non-touch color LCD is controlled by buttons, 3 underneath the screen to select functions (copy, scan, or cloud); Home; On; plus and minus for setting the number of copies, monochrome and color scan buttons, and a 4-way rocker with center button.

Mobile Printing Features
The MG5520 is AirPrint-compatible, and also provides access to Pixma Cloud Link—which lets you print pictures from online photo albums, office templates, and more, even without a computer—and Google Cloud Print, which lets you send documents to your printer from any Web-connected computer, smart phone, or device. It supports Pixma Printing Solutions (PPS), which lets you print and scan photos or documents from your mobile device. You can also print to the MG5520 by sending an email to an email address assigned to the printer.

With the cloud printing function you can print directly from select popular online Cloud services, such as Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and more, either at the printer itself or with your mobile device using the free PPS app. You can also print from afar, by sending an email to a dedicated email address assigned to the printer.

The MG5520 can connect via Wi-Fi or directly to a computer via USB. I tested it over a USB connection with a PC running Windows Vista.

Print Speed
Speed for printing office documents is not a strong point for the MG5520. It printed out our business applications suite (as timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) at 2.6 effective pages per minute (ppm), essentially the same speed as the MG7120 (2.5 ppm) and the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma MX922 at 2.4 ppm. We timed the Epson Expression Premium XP-600 Small-In-One Printer at a much faster 4.9 ppm.

It did better at photo speed, averaging 52 seconds per 4-by-6 print. The other printers discussed here all averaged 65 or 66 seconds per print.

Output Quality
Output quality is a strength for the MG5520, with slightly above-par text for an inkjet, average graphics quality, and slightly above-par photo quality. Text was good enough for any home, school, or in-house business use; I'd draw the line at documents like resumes with which you seek to impress through their visual appearance.

Graphics quality was below par, though still suitable for purposes like basic school or business reports. Though colors generally were good, some backgrounds showed a slight blotchiness or muted colors; several showed banding (a regular pattern of faint striations). Thin lines were all but lost in one illustration. Dithering in the form of graininess was obvious in some illustrations.

Photo quality was slightly above average for an inkjet. A monochrome photo showed slight tinting and a couple of splotches. There was a modest loss in detail in bright areas in a couple of prints. Most of the prints were at least drugstore quality, a couple of them better.

The MG5520 is a modestly priced home-centered MFP with few frills and slow speed, but good output quality, especially for photos and text. For the same price, you can get the much faster Epson Expression Premium XP-600 Small-In-One Printer, which also showed good photo quality and adds features like a port for a USB thumb drive, a memory-card reader, and a separate photo tray. Speed is usually less critical for home than for business use, so it may or may not be an important factor.

For $50 more than you'd pay for the MG5520, you can get the Canon MG7120, which adds a touch screen, memory-card reader, separate photo tray, and a sixth, gray ink tank. Alternately, you can get the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma MX922, which adds fax, Ethernet, a duplexing ADF, and a port for a USB thumb drive. Like the MG5520, both those Canons share above-par photo quality and ponderous print speed.

The Canon Pixma MG5520 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-in-One Printer can fit the bill as a modestly priced home printer with very good photo quality and relatively fast photo-printing speed for a printer of its price. Although it lacks the richer feature set of some comparable systems, it should deliver where it counts for many photo-happy home users.

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Canon Pixma MG7120 BK Wireless Inkjet Photo All-In-One Printer

The Canon Pixma MG7120 BK Wireless Photo All-in-One Printer is an attractive multifunction printer (MFP) primarily for home use. It offers good output quality, ponderous document printing speed, and a solid if somewhat basic set of features.

The MG7120 can print, copy, and scan. It can print from and scan to memory cards, scan as an attachment to an email; to a PC; or a network drive. You can preview images on its 3.5-inch LCD touch screen. It has a memory-card reader, which supports formats in the SD/SDHC, Memory Stick, Microdrive, xD/Picture Card families, and even CompactFlash.

The MG7120 is glossy black with beveled front and sides. (A white version of the printer is also available.) The front panel's centerpiece is the 3.5-inch touch screen; the printer lacks physical buttons. A lid on top conceals the flatbed. It lacks an automatic document feeder for easily scanning multipage documents.

The MG7120 measures 5.9 by 18.4 by 14.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 18.1 pounds. It has a 125-sheet main paper tray plus photo tray that fits 20 sheets of 4-by-6 paper or 10 sheets of 5-by-7 paper; it can also print on optical disks. It has an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper.

The inkjet MFP is efficiently designed, with the two paper trays stacked together underneath the fold-open output tray. The MG7120 has 6 ink tanks: pigment black (for text printing); yellow; cyan; magenta; dye black; and gray; the latter two to enhance photo quality.

A program in the software suite lets you set the text and images for printing on optical disks, and offers a choice of layout templates. My Image Garden lets you organize photos and easily use them in creative projects.

Mobile Printing
This AirPrint compatible MFP also provides access to Pixma Cloud Link, which lets you print pictures from online photo albums, office templates, and more, even without a computer; and Google Cloud Print, which lets you send documents to your printer from any Web-connected computer, smart phone, or device. It supports PIXMA Printing Solutions (PPS), which lets you print and scan photos or documents from your mobile device.

With the cloud printing function you can print directly from select popular online Cloud services, such as Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and more, either at the printer itself or with your mobile device using the free PPS app. You can also print from afar, by sending an email to a dedicated email address for the printer.

This printer offers Wi-Fi and USB connectivity; I tested it over a USB connection with its driver installed on a PC running Windows Vista.

Print Speed
The MG7120 printed out the latest version of our business applications suite (as timed by QualityLogic's hardware and software) at a speed of 2.5 effective pages per minute (ppm), which is slow for an inkjet MFP at its price. We timed the HP Photosmart 7520 e-All-in-One at 3.7 ppm; the lower-priced Canon Pixma MG5520 turned in a 2.6 ppm speed. The Editors' Choice Canon Pixma MX922, which despite its name packs in as many features for home use as for home- or micro-office use, tested at 2.4 ppm.

Output Quality
Overall output quality was above par for an inkjet, with average text and graphics quality and above-average photo quality. Text quality is fine for standard home, school, or business uses, though you probably wouldn't use it for documents such as resumes with which you seek to make a good visual impression.

As for graphics, although colors generally looked good, backgrounds were a bit muted in several illustrations. In one figure, thin colored lines were nearly lost. Many illustrations showed dithering in the form of graininess.

Photo quality was above par for an inkjet, better than what you'd expect from drugstore prints. A monochrome photo showed a hint of red, but subtle enough that few eyes would give it any heed; it only bears mention because among the 6 ink tanks, in addition to pigment black for text, are dye ink tanks for both black and gray. Prints showed good detail in both light and dark areas, except in one print where some detail was lost in a bright area. One print showed a bit of posterization, abrupt changes in color where they should be gradual. Consumers in general should be happy with the MG7120's print quality.

Running Costs
The cost per printed page for the MG7120, based on Canon's prices and yield figures for the most cost-effective cartridges, is 4.6 cents per monochrome page and 13.5 cents per color page.

The MG7120 is a handsome and capable home-centered MFP with solid output quality, led by good photo quality. It is slow for its price, though no more so than other Canon inkjet MFPs we've reviewed, including the Canon Pixma MG5520 and Canon MX922. It also shares with them solid output quality, with above-par photos.

For $50 more than you'd pay for the Canon Pixma MG5520 Wireless Photo All-in-One Printer, the MG7120 adds a larger, touch screen (the MG5520's screen is non-touch, controlled by buttons) plus the ability to print from memory cards, plus the gray ink tank (the Canon MG5520 has the standard color tanks plus a both pigment and dye blacks). For many users, those flourishes will be worth the extra cash.

While the MG7120 has a solid set of features, particularly for home use, the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma MX922 adds a raft of features, many of them good for either home, home-office, or micro-office use. These include Ethernet in addition to Wi-Fi and USB; a 35-sheet duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF); fax capability; and a 250-sheet main paper tray plus a 20-sheet photo-paper tray, while retaining home features like the ability to print on optical disks and superior photo quality. It does have a port for a USB thumb drive instead of the MG7120's memory-card reader, but in either case, it's easy enough to print from a thumb drive or memory card from a PC's port or card slot.

For some home users, the MX922's extra features will be overkill, and for them, the MG7120 may be a compelling choice. Although all three of the Canon MFPs mentioned here have above-average photo quality, the addition of the sixth ink tank could make a difference, particularly in rendering subtle shades of gray. It's a nice touch for a $150 printer.

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