The Canon Pixma TR7020a is a compact all-in-one inkjet printer that packs a punch, especially when you consider its price tag, which often dips below $100. This makes it a tempting option for home offices and small businesses. But with such a low price, it’s natural to wonder if there are any sacrifices made in terms of features or quality.
To answer that question, I put the Pixma TR7020a through its paces, evaluating its design, print performance, special features, software compatibility, and overall value. Here’s what I discovered:
Design:
The Pixma TR7020a has a sleek and modern design, featuring an off-white body with light gray panels on the bottom. Its slim profile makes it easy to integrate into any home office setup. It’s also relatively compact for an all-in-one printer with an ADF, measuring 15.9 inches by 14.4 inches and standing 8.2 inches tall. Weighing just 18 pounds, it’s easy to move around. The 1.4-inch monochrome display is conveniently located on the front, making it easy to read when sitting. The buttons are clearly labeled and user-friendly, especially for making copies.
Printing Performance:
The Pixma TR7020a delivers good print quality. Monochrome documents are crisp and sharp, even with fine print. While the first page takes about 20 seconds, the printer can achieve a speed of 13 pages per minute (ppm) on long monochrome documents. Color documents look great, but take almost twice as long, printing at up to 7 ppm. While this is acceptable for a budget printer, faster models exist, such as HP’s OfficeJet Pro 8135e, which offers speeds of 20 ppm black and 10 ppm color but comes at a higher price.
Canon highlights the Pixma TR7020a’s use of Chromalife100 System13 ink, which extends the lifespan of photo prints. Pictures printed on glossy photo paper display good contrast and accurate colors, with the potential to last up to 100 years in a photo album, 30 years behind glass, or 20 years unprotected. However, the printer struggles with plain paper photos, producing gray blacks and washed-out colors. While tweaking settings offered limited improvement, the best result involved selecting the photo matte paper setting when printing on plain paper. Even then, the contrast remained too low. For important photos, glossy paper is always recommended for inkjet printers.
Special Features:
The Pixma TR7020a is a true all-in-one printer, featuring a 35-sheet ADF that allows for multipage document copying without having to manually feed sheets into the flatbed scanner. While duplex copying isn’t supported, you can copy single-sided pages and print them double-sided to conserve paper. Other useful features include reduction and enlargements from 25% to 400%, collation, and printing two pages on one sheet. The scanner delivers good quality at 600 dots per inch (dpi) with accurate color, although it’s slower than the printer, resulting in slightly longer copy times than original prints—13 ppm for black-and-white and 6 ppm for color.
Software and Compatibility:
Setting up the Pixma TR7020a was a breeze. It’s a lightweight printer, making it easy to move around. After plugging it in, inserting the two ink cartridges and paper, the printer automatically aligns its printheads. Unlike some inkjet printers that require manual adjustments or placing a printed page in the flatbed scanner, the Pixma TR7020a prints two pages and pulls them back into the printer to complete alignment. To connect to Wi-Fi, I used the Canon Print mobile app, which quickly found my local network and established a connection without needing to enter my password on the printer’s tiny screen. This is a welcome feature, and more printers should embrace this capability. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi allow phones to transmit connection details, eliminating the burden on the user. While the printer only supports 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, it proved to be very responsive. A wired connection to a computer via a USB-B cable is also possible, although Wi-Fi offers greater speed and convenience. Canon has included a QR button that provides a quick link to the online manual if you encounter any issues. However, the installation process was effortless, and everything was up and running within minutes. The Canon Print app works well in most cases, but I encountered a limitation in printing envelopes from an iPhone or Android phone. It also lacks options for scan resolution. While the Pixma TR7020a supports 600 dpi, the app only scans at 300 dpi. For higher-resolution scans from your phone, consider the Epson Workforce WF-2930, which supports up to 600 dpi.
Price and Ink Costs:
The Pixma TR7020a has a retail price of $160, but you can often find it for half that price in stores and online. For an all-in-one printer with a duplex ADF, great picture quality on photo paper at acceptable speeds, $80 is a steal. However, a major concern is ink costs. As a cartridge printer, you’ll need to replenish supplies more frequently. Inkjet tanks offer better long-term value due to their lower ink cost per page. The Pixma TR7020a comes with standard PG-260 Black and CL-261 Color cartridges, each capable of printing about 180 pages. When it’s time for replacements, you’ll pay between $20 and $36 for each cartridge. The larger XL cartridges cost more upfront but offer better value. Black ink costs nine to 11 cents per page, and a tri-color ink cartridge is 11 to 16 cents per page. Buying larger capacity ink and toner cartridges is usually the most economical choice, as it saves money, reduces cartridge swaps, and generates less plastic waste.
Final Thoughts:
The Canon Pixma TR7020a presents an attractive price and manageable size. It handles monochrome and color documents well and includes scanning and copying features, along with an ADF to handle multiple pages at once. This makes it a suitable option for home offices or part-time businesses with moderate printing needs. If you anticipate daily printing or copying, the relatively high cost of ink cartridges will become a factor. Pictures look great on glossy photo paper but appear washed-out on plain paper. The lack of duplex copying from the ADF is also a drawback. For a printer that addresses these limitations, consider the Canon Pixma G3270. Laser printers offer larger cartridges than inkjets, reducing the frequency of supply purchases. If color printing isn’t a requirement, there are excellent deals on fast monochrome laser printers that can save you time and money in the long run. If you like the look of the Pixma TR7020a but don’t need the ADF, the Canon Pixma TS6420a is a less expensive option with comparable performance and quality.
