This Top Tested Canon Printer Uses Wildly Cheap Ink—and Just Got a Big Prime Day Price Chop

As the editor responsible for printer reviews at PCMag, I’m intimately familiar with the trials and tribulations of buying a printer for home use. The cheapest ones often require the most expensive ink, and vice versa. Now, thanks to this exceptional Prime Day discount on the Canon Maxify GX4020, you can have your cheap ink without spending crazy money on a printer to put it in. It was $334 earlier this week for Prime Day, and here on the last day, it just dropped another $30.

The GX4020 pairs the low running cost of an ink-tank printer with paper-handling flexibility and a reasonably high paper capacity. In addition to a 250-sheet front drawer and a 100-sheet tray at the top rear of the printer (which makes it easy to handle two or more paper types), you get a single-sheet tray with a straight-through path for heavyweight paper in the back.

(Credit: Canon)

Once you unpack the printer, all that’s left for physical setup is to load paper and pour in the ink—cyan, yellow, magenta, and black. The bottles are keyed to ensure that each color goes into the right tank. After you finish, the printer goes through a completely automated alignment routine.

Canon’s website says the ink that comes with the printer is enough to print 5,000 standard black-and-white pages plus 5,000 color pages. Each set of replacement bottles will print 6,000 black-and-white pages plus 14,000 color pages, which works out to a cost of 0.14 cent per mono page and 0.85 cent per color page.

In our tests, graphics on plain paper with default settings offered nicely saturated color and good gradients, and the printouts also maintained thin lines well, including a single-pixel-wide line on a black background.

The GX4020 is our Editors’ Choice-award-winning inkjet all-in-one printer for small offices, emphasizing heavy-duty printing and moderate-duty scanning. But it’s great for a heavy-printing household, too, that is tired of constantly shopping for the best price on expensive ink cartridges. Normally retailing for $539.99, the GX4020 is now on sale for just over $300 on Prime Day.

Also, be sure to check out more top Prime Day printer deal picks.

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About Tom Brant

Deputy Managing Editor

I’m the deputy managing editor of the hardware team at PCMag.com. Reading this during the day? Then you’ve caught me testing gear and editing reviews of laptops, desktop PCs, and tons of other personal tech. (Reading this at night? Then I’m probably dreaming about all those cool products.) I’ve covered the consumer tech world as an editor, reporter, and analyst since 2015.

I’ve evaluated the performance, value, and features of hundreds of personal tech devices and services, from laptops to Wi-Fi hotspots and everything in between. I’ve also covered the launches of dozens of groundbreaking technologies, from hyperloop test tracks in the desert to the latest silicon from Apple and Intel.

I’ve appeared on CBS News, in USA Today, and at many other outlets to offer analysis on breaking technology news.

Before I joined the tech-journalism ranks, I wrote on topics as diverse as Borneo’s rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and Big Data’s role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, I also have a master’s degree in journalism and French Studies from New York University.

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