Canon Pixma G4270 MegaTank: a long-lasting home office printer

Canon’s Pixma G4270 MegaTank inkjet printer is an affordable all-in-one, including fax capability, that will keep printing for a long time. It’s built for a heavy workload, making it a good option for home office use.

The best test of a tank printer is a massive number of prints. I churned through a lot of paper to check how the included ink supply held up before replacement and tested the setup experience, scan, copy, and print quality.

The bottom line is the price, long-term costs, and ensuring there’s good value for the money. Let’s check out the Canon Pixma G4270 all-in-one MegaTank.

Design

The Canon Pixma G4270 is all black with nice curved edges and a subtle dot pattern on the bottom half that looks nice. It blends well with office equipment and will fit in nicely with your computer and other tech that tends to be black.

The front panel has clearly labeled, functional buttons with white labels that will stand out even in a shady corner. A green start button prints and copies in color, while the white start button begins black-and-white operations. The stop button is red. Color coding is always helpful.

With a footprint of 16-by-22 inches and standing 10.25 inches high, the Canon Pixma G4270 is a compact all-in-one.

The paper tray is in the rear, but the right side of the automatic document feeder (ADF) is low enough that it’s easy to see the paper guides even on a counter-height printer stand. If your stand is desk-height, the control panel’s tilt is slight enough that you might need to bend to see the display well.

The monochrome display is a bit small at 1.4 inches, but the menu options are well-designed. Ultimately, the mobile app is a better choice for most operations.

Printing performance

Print speed is better than average for an entry-level home office printer. Canon estimates an average of 11 pages per minute (ppm) for black-and-white and six ppm for color documents.

The Canon Pixma G4270 can’t compete with a laser printer or high-throughput inkjet, but it’s nice to have a little extra speed when printing a sizable stack of reports or letters.

Print quality for documents is crisp and reliable. Color documents look good, and there’s no banding in blocks of color.

The photographic print quality is good but could be better. Most of the Pixma G4270’s photo prints have a warm tint. While leaning toward cool or warm is somewhat common in low-cost printers, some tinkering usually helps. I tried playing with various settings but couldn’t find a solution beyond adjusting the photo on my computer or phone before printing.

Canon’s Pixma G4270 MegaTank inkjet can print borderless photos in various sizes and is relatively fast. It works well for documents that include images, but you might prefer a dedicated photo printer if pictures are a common need.

The printer detects paper changes, and an on-screen prompt asks for the matching size and type. Overall, operation at the printer is simple, with one exception, as I’ll explain below.

Special features

The Pixma G4270 is an all-in-one printer that also includes fax capability. I don’t have a physical phone line to test that feature; however, as a fax machine manufacturer, Canon understands the technology well. It should work as expected.

I experienced some problems with the copy feature. With the ADF, it kept stopping after 10 pages. I don’t understand why. The capacity is 35 sheets, but I only reached 13 pages once before stopping with an error message, “Can’t communicate with scanner.”

While the flatbed scanner works more reliably, copies kept cutting off the edges, leaving a quarter-inch margin, even when I selected borderless copy from the menu. I carefully checked that I aligned the document well at the left-back corner. Admittedly, it had slim margins, but borderless should be just that.

Despite these issues, copying was acceptable in most cases. With standard documents with quarter-inch or larger margins, there isn’t a problem. For color copies output to glossy photo paper, borderless works.

The Canon Pixma G4270 can scan to my smartphone with the mobile app. It’s also possible to scan to a computer with system software or Canon’s software. The optical resolution is 600 x 1200 dots per inch, which is good enough for most uses. If you need higher resolution or optical character recognition, a dedicated scanner would be required.

Software and compatibility

Setting up the Canon Pixma G4270 was quick and easy with the Canon Print app. Although this is a tank printer that uses bottled ink for refills, the printer came with two cartridges as well. These cartridges contain print heads for black and color ink.

One odd detail is the instruction telling me to squeeze the ink bottle. The plastic is quite rigid and wouldn’t budge. It turned out this wasn’t necessary because the ink quickly drained into the tanks simply with the force of gravity.

The Pixma G4270 MegaTank includes four bottles of ink for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, all of the colors needed for full-color printing. Canon estimates that supply provides 6,000 black-and-white pages and 7,700 color pages.

That’s an order of magnitude greater than you’ll receive from most inkjet cartridge printers. Tank printers have a huge advantage in this regard, offering more capacity, low-cost ink supplies, and eliminating waste.

I used my iPhone for setup, and there’s also a mobile app for Android. I tested printing and scanning with each device and had no issues with the software.

Windows and macOS support is also painless. The Pixma G4270 showed up in settings, making it possible to print and scan immediately. While a direct USB cable connection is possible, Wi-Fi is just as fast and gives you the freedom to place the printer anywhere you like.

Good long-term value

At $250, the Canon Pixma G4270 all-in-one offers a low entry cost and good long-term value. With built-in printing, scanning, copying, and faxing, it replaces multiple devices yet has a compact size.

When you do need to replace ink, you can order individual bottles. That’s great if you find you print more magenta and black than yellow and cyan, for example.

Even if you need a complete set of ink, it’s $13 per color bottle and $18 for black. That’s three-tenths of a cent in ink for each black-and-white page and five-tenths per color page. Ink cost is no longer a consideration.

Is this the printer for you?

Canon’s Pixma G4270 all-in-one MegaTank is a workhorse with a monthly duty cycle of 3,000 pages. This long-lasting inkjet printer lets you forget about ink cartridges and focus on your work.

Print speed isn’t blistering fast, but the Canon Pixma G4270 rolls out black-and-white and color documents noticeably quicker than most low-cost tank printers. Also, scanning was reliable and offered good quality.

Color tints in photo prints and a few quirks with copying were bothersome, but overall, the Pixma G4270 is a good value for use in a home office where you need an everything device that can fill in the gaps without taking up a lot of space.

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