Canon printers are not what they used to be

[sebastian_alv]

And that's to put it mildly. I ordered two Canon printers in the last week, and both are going back to Amazon. The first one, the TS-7720, was a really cheap one to use as an every day printer. Imagine my surprise when I go to try to find generic ink for it on Amazon and each set was about $135!!! The Canon genuine ink is about $75 and the generic ink is twice as much! At first I thought it was a scumbag seller, but I keep looking, and there's just no other generic ink for this printer that is even at the same price as Canon's! And for anyone at Canon reading this, please be sure of one thing: NOBODY buys a $100 printer to use genuine Canon ink. In fact, the only people that buy genuine ink are professional photographers with much more expensive printers.

Or so I thought, because last night, when looking for another printer since the TS-7720 is obviously going back to Amazon, I saw another Canon printer, the G3270, which is one of those models with the giant tanks. Canon marketing promises it prints over 7,000 pages on one tank, so even if that's not true, but it's 5,000 or so, still sounds far better than anything else.

Even better, the ink bottles are not super cheap, but at $12 per bottle, if they last that long, they are cheaper than generic ink. So I said, let's give it a try.

When it arrived today, I was mesmerized by the size of the ink bottles, and how well designed the system was, to the point where I got no ink on my fingers, something that happens often with the usual cartridges. It only took a few minutes to setup, and then download the program that downloads everything else like drivers, etc.

But soon I see the first show of lack of common sense design in this printer; the tiny display on it is barely readable. Unlike most printers these days, the panel doesn't tilt, so you have to get on your knees to read anything on it. Absolutely abysmal. But to make matters worse, the quality of the LCD display is so bad that you can barely read the text. It's like a display from the early 90's, just terrible quality. But that I could deal with, since I barely use displays on printers.

But the comes the part that I can't deal with, and will make this another printer going back to Amazon. And that is, that the quality of the photo prints is absolutely horrible. Being a Canon customer for many years, over a decade with two DSLRs and three printers, I never imagined that a Canon printer would be so bad at printing photos. I mean, Canon is THE company when it comes to imaging. Sure, their software is terrible, to not have an Apple Silicon version of their "Digital Photo Professional" app, four years after the release of Apple Silicon machines is nonsensical, but when it comes to hardware, like cameras and printers, they are among the very best. Until recently I had a Pixma MX922 that lasted me for years and printed perfect photos.

But I start printing photos in this one, using Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II, from the Canon Print app, and they all come washed out. Anybody with any experience printing photos knows that if you try to print from any photo app usually it comes out different than what it should. But if you use the app that the printer manufacturer provides, then it comes out perfect. Well, that is not the case with this printer. 

In fact, I do a Google search and apparently many other users reported this. Which tells me that the printer is just that way, because the only ones reporting this are the ones that are more picky about picture quality like me, most people think it just looks that way. Since the prints don't look too terrible, just washed out, most people don't care.

Then I read that some people say that if you set the paper to matte then it prints with good contrast. Not the case. What does print with more contrast is to set the paper type to automatic, which then prints a mess of a photo with so much ink, the moment you grab it, you get some on your fingers. The photo itself looks awful, over saturated and with weird colors and crushed blacks. Did I say this is with Canon's own paper, and one of the highest quality ones?

Also, this printer driver doesn't install any color profiles in the system, at least in macOS. For my Pixma MX922 I had all the different profiles for the different papers. This one, nothing.

Then there's the **bleep** admin password for the web interface. What the hell is up with that? You can't access the web interface unless you type an admin password that is nowhere to be found. After searching documents and more documents, it points a Canon website that says what passwords are for different products, and if yours is not on that list, then it's the serial number. So I take a photo of the serial number, type it in, and it takes me back to the same prompt. 

I was only able to access the web interface using the Canon Print app on my phone, and there's a setting to disable the admin password, but to do that, you need to enter the admin password!!!! The one that is nowhere!!!! Do these people test these things?

So I'm done with Canon. This one is going back to Amazon, and I'm getting an Epson Ecotank. Because another way I know this printer sucks when it comes to photo quality is that I printed the same three photos to both this one and to my Epson XP-7100, and the ones from the Epson came out perfect. The colors are great, they look authentic, and very similar to what I see on the screen. But with this Canon G3270, photos are terrible.

[shadowsports]

Greetings,

Wow.  Quite a post.  If you are looking for superior photo quality, I'd look at one of Canon's professional photo printers.  

Actual page yield depends on percentage of ink coverage.  So, 7,000 pages might be possible with 3% ink coverage.  Overall page yield decreases as the percentage of ink coverages increases.. This needs to be taken into consideration.  All printers utilize this standard.  

I prefer laser printers myself which do a great jobs with office documents, presentations and basic photo prints.  

Again, I would recommend one of Canon's professional photo series models if you need  your prints to meet exacting, high quality standards.  Accurate color reproduction, resolution, gradients, sharpness, etc.  

[sebastian_alv]

No, I don't need a professional photo printer. Like I said, I had a Canon Pixma MX922, which I paid $80 for in 2016, that printed great quality photos. I don't expect the perfection from professional prints. I expect that a brand new Canon printer will have at least the same quality as my previous one, which was a low priced consumer printer. The G3270 doesn't get close to that standard, it prints washed out photos. I have a feeling that hardware wise, it could achieve much better results, but this printer's driver is garbage. It doesn't even have the basics like the manual dialog where you can at least adjust basic picture settings like brightness, contrast, saturation and so on. This thing has two settings for quality, one is the paper type selection, and the other is a generic quality setting that has two or three options. So setting those to the paper I mentioned, and obviously quality to "Best", I get washed out photos. 

So this is not a matter of me being too demanding for regular consumer printers, it's a matter of Canon dropping the ball and making worse printers than they used to, or, it's a matter of them not writing the proper drivers for their printers. Either way, the brand suffers and people are going to Epson, HP and other brands.

[Am11]

I agree. Canon printers aren't what i recall- my first was a a Canon Bubble jet in 1993-94). That one printed perfectly and now 30 years later I bought a Pixma G4270 supertank, and the colours are all washed out. Like you mentioned, the LCD is barely readable, and proper addressing of issues on this board from what I've seen is nearly non-existent.

[sebastian_alv]

I bought an Epson ET-4800 right away, and I couldn't be happier. Also with giant tanks, and decent drivers that print what you see on the screen, not some washed out version of it. Printing from the phone to it also looks great. It's a set and forget printer, with great photo quality, exactly what I wanted. 

I have no idea why Canon has dropped the ball so badly with its printers. This is not a second rate company in the imaging industry, it used to be number one, and their cameras still are, but the people who write their software are the worst. Be it drivers for their printers, or an abomination like Digital Photo Professional 4 for their DSLRs, a software that in late 2024 still doesn't have an Apple Silicon version. That's downright stupid, everybody knows that most photographers and videographers use Macs. Why would you give them a software as clunky and slow as that to do important work. It's barely usable.