The Canon Pixma G4210 came along in a very unexpected way. A mix of beta software that gave me printing hiccups, near empty third party ink (that I wasn’t happy with the color accuracy of), and my eldest child’s first school year meant my Canon Pixma Pro-100 was on the chopping block.

I had just read Canons financials a few months ago and noted their standout products were their EOS M50, which I can believe, and the Megatank G series printers which I’d heard of but never looked at before. Having had good luck with Canon printers in the past like the Pro-100 and other Pixmas, and reading up on the G series I couldn’t figure out the difference between the G4200 and G4210 other than extra black ink bundled at purchase. I did decide WiFi and ADF scanning were important thus it would be either the G4200 or G4210. Duplex printing not being available is (highly) unfortunate, but that was clearly to protect this inkjet from Canon-balizing Canon’s own laser division which is a (very) large division. You can’t beat an inkjet on photo quality though (vs laser), I didn’t mind the trade off of either manually printing even-odd pages and flipping for the photo quality at the price point (which I do manually flip odd pages and reprint odd page flips on even pages as desired).

Consumer reports correctly identified the difference between the G4210 and all its siblings in print quality, that’s important to me coming from a Pro-100 which sealed the deal for me as I wanted something that would at least be somewhat close in photo capability. I ordered it direct from Canon as my corporate discount ala the Canon EPP program for participating fortune 500s was pretty good on the G4210.

Physical setup of the printer was straightforward. Pairing it to WiFi required a WPS pin as my MacOS (latest) at the time didn’t permit the Canon install helper to auto pair the printer to my WiFi and manual entry only permitted alpha characters, not numbers, oddly so that was a notable blip to be wary of if you're a Mac owner and want to use it on WiFi. Hopefully Canon's fixed this for the latest MacOS by now (as this article I actually started months ago and am only now getting to finishing).

Print quality was superb on text and graphics, but the 4x6 photos I immediately printed after kicking out preschool material and return labels ran a little low contrast but had top-notch sharpness and color accuracy. I assumed it was a color profile issue as I’ve fought many a battle with color calibration on a printer. To my dismay, there are no traditional color profiles: the AirPrint/secure AirPrint is akin to a digital signal vs an analog one; it appears to send the raw data to the printer and the printer renders and spits it out. This is good as it takes the many rasterization headaches out, but still leaves me with how do I “fix” this problem? After I gave up, and was telling myself, well, I am getting about 80% as good at a fraction of the cost which is what I wanted, by sheer accident after loading paper again a couple hours later for something else I noted the printer asked me on the LCD panel what I loaded. This time I told it I loaded 4x6 glossy and told it that when I did, and magically my photos now came out VERY close to what my Pro-100 did, on OEM ink, contrast issues gone. You see the printer is now handling those issues of profiles and rasterization in-printer, which is largely a good thing as it takes calibration out of the equation. I did however many moons later discover that perhaps this was ink settling as the prints themselves, just like my Pixma Pro-100 before it, take some time to set for final rendition which I think is actually the issue, not the paper settings on the printer, but maybe it has something to do with it.

I have found though, that those tanks aren’t so limitless. When printing on the highest quality for those 4x6 photos which have 100% coverage vs your standard 8.5x11 print which averages 4% coverage, after chomping through close to a hundred full 4x6's, my color tanks have moved about a good 15% vs my black is still effectively full. I did some quick math, and noted the 75ml color inks and 130ml black ink, are effectively 1/5 the price I was paying for my Pro-100 OEM ink per ml, so the savings is very real and very large but not quite the 0.3 cent per page claim which obviously applied to standard prints, but not photos. That said I don’t have to put up with third party ink either having color accuracy issues, QA issues (not working) or fading prints (experienced all 3 with my last two third party refills) which I did go back to some 4x6's printed on third party ink about a year ago and found some pretty bad red bleeding if you will that made the photos inappropriate for display. Guess those third party refills are cutting costs somewhere.

I did find the Pixma G4210's software suite to be much superior on the Windows side of the house vs the MacOS, both in setup, and printing, scanning etc. But it performs just fine on my Mac, just you have to keep track or alias/bookmark the network IJ scan tool for scanning and get past initial WiFi setup.

Also being able to Airprint from my wife's iPhone has been huge for her. She prints a lot to it from her iPhone and loves it. She's very low-tech vs I'm very high-tech so to see her making good use of it is a good thing.

The one complaint I might have, is the energy saving feature. It's nice that it powers itself off all the time, but, my wife refuses to touch the printer under any circumstances other than to add paper. Thus I'm constantly turning the thing back on. Minor complaint. I’ve since gone into the web gui and disabled the energy saving behavior.

Overall I'm very happy with the Canon Pixma G4210 Megatank printer, I've had it a few months now as of the finalization of this article, and, I still haven't had to refill it yet. I've printed a couple full 8.5x11's on it, and I'll admit I do miss my larger 13x19 prints from the Pro-100, but, it's hard to beat the cost per page on the G4210 and the print quality is top notch for a tri-color + black inkjet.