Canon PIXMA G3260/G3262 Printer Review

The Canon G3260 has decent build quality. It has a sturdy-feeling plastic body and a removable power cable that makes it easy to replace if it gets damaged. It provides good access to the ink tanks if you lift the top cover. The scanner lid can stay open on its own, but the lid dampener isn't great, so it could slam shut if you don't guide it down carefully. Unfortunately, the individual ink covers feel flimsy. Also, it only has a USB Type-B port, so you can't plug it into your router with an Ethernet cable.

The Canon PIXMA G3260 has typical maintenance procedures you can expect from an inkjet. If you experience degraded print quality, you can perform a variety of tasks, including nozzle checks, cleaning, deep cleaning, and alignment for the printheads. There's also roller cleaning, bottom plate cleaning, and ink flushing to clear out any other ink-related issues in other parts of the printer that could degrade or smudge prints. Additionally, it features a transport mode to make it safer to bring around in case you have to move it. As a supertank inkjet, you refill the ink by inserting the ink bottle's nozzle upside down into the proper tank input, which takes some time for a full refill but is very easy to do. Since each ink bottle color only fits into its corresponding tank, it's almost impossible to accidentally fill a tank with the wrong ink.

Although it can yield many thousands of pages, it only has a small input tray with a 100-sheet capacity, so you have to take the time to refill it often. The only way to reach potential paper jams is by gently pulling on the sheet from the input or output trays; you could also reach them via theaccess door of the ink tanks, but you have to be careful not to touch the tubes.

The Canon G3260 has a poor display screen. It's a two-line, mono LCD that's tilted vertically. While it has good visibility if you're looking directly at it, it's hard to read the text from the side. It has the same physical buttons on its panel as the Canon PIXMA G2260, but it also includes an Easy Wireless Connect button, which allows the printer to become discoverable by your computer during the setup process. You can also use it whenever you pair it to a new computer or mobile device to make the process quicker. Look at the Canon PIXMA G3270 if you want a similarly designed printer with a slightly better display.

The Canon PIXMA G3260 has an incredible cartridge system. Thanks to its four high-capacity ink tanks, it yields an exceptional number of pages for both black and color ink, so you don't need to refill them often, even if you print a lot. While you can technically fill the supertanks with any third-party ink, we didn't try it and don't recommend doing so. Low-quality ink can damage the print heads, and, unlike standard inkjet printers, the ink can't be simply removed if there's a problem. Using third-party supplies can also void your warranty.

The Canon PIXMA G3260 has a disappointing array of scanner features. Unlike the Canon PIXMA G1200, it has a high-resolution flatbed scanner with hinges that can raise to scan thick items; however, it doesn't have a sheetfed scanner, so it takes a while to scan multiple sheets at a time. On the bright side, there's built-in OCR, which lets you save scanned documents as searchable PDFs so you can easily search for passages or keywords without having to manually comb through lots of sheets.

Although the Canon PIXMA G3260's manual specifies that it has internal 48-bit color depth, the printer can only send scans with up to a 24-bit color depth, meaning scans look the same as what you'd get from other typical all-in-ones. The scanner defaults to a resolution of 300 DPI, which is more than enough to capture text and graphs, but if you want to capture fine details in photos, you can bump it up to 1200 DPI.

• User manual
• Power cable
• 1 x black print head (not pictured)
• 1 x color print head (not pictured)
• Canon GI-21 ink bottles:
• 3x pigment black
• 1x cyan
• 1x yellow
• 1x magenta

The Canon PIXMA G3260 has an incredibly low cost-per-print. Since its supertank system yields many pages, you don't have to refill the tanks or buy new ink bottles often, keeping costs very low. Also, its cost-per-print for photos is among the lowest we've tested. You can also register for Canon's Auto Replenishment Service, which automatically orders and delivers ink bottles to you when you're running low. However, your printer has to have an active Internet connection for it to work.

The Canon PIXMA G3260 has poor printing speeds. It takes a while to begin printing after going unused for a long time, and it prints both black and color sheets very slowly. Unlike the Canon PIXMA G1220 and the Canon PIXMA G2260, photos also take a long time. Also, you need to manually flip over each page when prompted since it can't automatically print double-sided.

The heaviest compatible media that the Canon G3260 supports is Canon-brand Magnetic Photo Paper (670 g/m²).

The Canon PIXMA G3260 has a good color gamut. Although the vibrant zig-zag line is lost in most of the image except the pinks, yellows, and oranges, the printer doesn't attempt to wrongly render them as darker shades, like the Canon MAXIFY GX7020. The white gradient extends too far down in the dark blues and oranges, meaning it can't produce very light shades of those colors. On the other hand, the black extends too high up in the yellow and pink, so it can't produce very dark shades of those colors, specifically. Additionally, the transitions between colors are smooth and have almost no grain, so photos of sunsets won't have banding.

The Canon PIXMA G3260 has decent color accuracy. It produces most hues accurately, although it has a bit of trouble with darker shades that could cause it not to properly render some parts of dark scenes. It's still more than enough for casual color printing, but if you need exact color reproduction, it's best to look elsewhere.

The Canon PIXMA G3260 has decent connectivity options. It uses a USB-A to USB-B cable for printing while hard-wired to a computer, but oddly, the cable isn't included in the box.

The Canon G3620 has an excellent mobile app that lets you print, scan, and copy, as well as order ink. When you use the app to scan, you can save the scanned item directly to your mobile device. You can print Microsoft Office files and PDFs directly from your mobile device, but the app needs to convert them first.

The Canon PIXMA G3260 is fully compatible with Windows and macOS. You need to manually install drivers to access the full range of printer settings on Windows, whereas you don't have to worry about manually installing anything on macOS. On Chrome OS, you can print without manually installing anything, but you can't use the built-in software to scan. While you can install the Canon PRINT Inkjet/SELPHY app on Chrome OS (ver. 2.8.4) to get the same range of features as on a mobile device, it crashes whenever you try to launch it.