Canon Pixma G3501
An affordable MFP with hefty ink tanks that keep printing costs low, but it doesn’t support duplexing
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PRICE £199 (£239 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk
Canon has a bewildering array of printers in its Pixma G series, which it also calls MegaTanks. There are mono and colour printers, with and without various networking options, and with or without the usual MFP add-ons such as a scanner, document feeder and fax machine.
The G3501 is at the cheaper end of the colour scale. It looks expensive at £239 but remember that cost is frontloaded: it comes with enough ink to print 12,000 mono pages (from two bottles of black ink) and 7,000 colour pages. By the time you come to need to replace it, the cost of refuelling drops to 0.2p per mono page and 0.4p per colour page – which is the standard ongoing cost across all three tank printers we’ve reviewed this month.
Getting the Canon filled and ready to go isn’t difficult, but it isn’t as foolproof as
Epson’s EcoTank system. You have to squeeze Canon’s ink bottles to load the ink into the tanks and there’s no security system to stop you filling tanks with the wrong ink (although everything is well labelled). After that, Canon had our preferred system of printer setup, encouraging you to a website with step-by-step guides and videos, which a confident installer can simply skip through, but are ready and waiting to guide the nervous.
This model doesn’t have a screen of its own. Instead, control on the device itself is limited to five buttons, which are mostly devoted to turning the printer on and making copies. Nor can the Pixma 3501 flip a page over and print on both sides of a sheet; to achieve this, the user must re-feed the half-printed pages back into the printer. It also only has a single rear paper input tray, which can store 100 pages of plain paper but bu needs d swapping out if you want to print on other stock.
Print quality is consistent with other tank models, in that it falls a little short of expectations. It’s a long way from terrible and better than the cheapest inkjets, but it can’t compete with those that come with more than four colour cartridges. It was better at standard printing jobs than the Epson ET-2750, but the Epson produced superior photos, particularly in dark areas. There’s not a lot in it, though.
Like the other tank printers, the G3501 isn’t built for speed and sits in the bottom of the table for everything except for scanning high-res images. It’s a perfectly good MFP, but we
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