MC-G02

[Macnerd]

I'm in the market for an all-in-one printer. I was browsing around the website & saw the maintenance cartridge MC-G02. The website states that it is installed in select megatank printers. It doesn't state which printers. Into which megatank printers is it installed?

[adbuck]

I don't personally know the answer, but according to online retailer BH Photo, it is for Canon PIXMA G1220, G2260 & G3260 MegaTank Printers

[Macnerd]

Would you believe, as Maxwell Smart used to say, I found out which printers have the maintenance cartridge. After I sent the post!

I wonder why it's in the lower-priced megatank printers but not in the higher-priced megatank printers. I wish that it was in all megatank printers.

I wish that all inkjet printers of all brands had a maintenance cartridge.

[adbuck]

I agree. I have the Pixma G7020 Megatank and the maintenance cartridge on that printer is not user servicable. 

It is my understanding that frequent print head cleaning is one cause of failure of the maintenance cartridge. I don't do high volume frequent printing so this was a worry for me that the print heads would dry out and require cleaning. To prevent this, I created a simple BMP document with big rectangles filled in with pure black , cyan, magenta and yellow. I put a weekly reminder in my calendar to print this document once a week if I haven't used the printer much. I would have never done this with my old HP deskjet because the ink cost was so high, but with the Pixma Megatank the ink cost is dirt cheap, so I don't mind printing a full page of solid colors once a week. I just throw in a piece of scrap paper that I am going to throw away anyway and print my document that I named "Ink Dump". So far (after owing the printer for about 3 months) I have not needed to run the cleaning cycle a single time.

I don't know if this method really helps keep the ink flowing freely without using up the maintenance cartridge, but so far so good. I can say I really love the Pixma G7020 so far.

[Macnerd]

Interesting idea to print a page of solid colors. I didn't think of that idea. I played around with creating a document with a table which took up most of the page. The table had 4 cells. Each cell had 1 of the 4 colors. Is that how you did it or did you have 4 pages each with one of the 4 colors?

It's interesting that the lower-priced megatanks have user-replaceable maintenance cartridges but the higher-priced printers don't have user-replaceable maintenance cartridges. You'd think that it would be just the oposite - the higher-priced printers would have user-replaceable maintenance cartridges & the lower-priced printers wouldn't.

Don't ALL Canon inkjet printers automatically do a periodic head cleaning?

[adbuck]

I just print a single sheet of paper with 4 large rectangles, one for each color. Each rectangle is about 5.25" by 1.75" so they fit on a single 8.5" x 11" sheet.

I am not aware that my printer does spontaneous cleaning cycles, but I suppose it could happen as I do leave my printer powered on in sleep mode all the time. I print to it from many different devices (4 computers, a tablet, 2 phones) so I am rarely in the office where I keep it when it prints. I don't know if the menu system keeps a log of maintenance activities ... will try to check into that sometime.

Here is what my "Ink Dump" image looks like although the actual document is .BMP rather than .PNG.