Print a lot? Here's how to maximize your savings
A workhorse single-function printer, the Canon Maxify GX5020 stands out for its low cost per page, paired with print speeds and paper capacities that actually let you take full advantage of the potential savings.
Like most tank-based inkjet printers, the Canon Maxify GX5020 offers cheap ink as its biggest selling point. Canon's claimed cost per page with this single-function (print-only) model is less than 2 cents, but your cost may actually be a lot less. It poses the usual trade that such tank designs demand: You pay a high initial price (here, $399.99) for the printer proper, in return for the privilege of getting cheap ink. The upside here, though, is that if you print enough pages, the savings in running cost can make the GX5020 an outright bargain. That potential, plus speed, paper handling, and output quality that hit all the right marks, make the Maxify GX5020 our new Editors' Choice pick among single-function printers for home offices.
The GX5020 offers paper handling that's suitable for heavy-duty printing by personal to micro-office standards, or light- to medium-duty printing in a small office, either as a personal printer connected by USB or as a shared printer on a network. Its support for mobile printing, using Canon apps available for Android and iOS devices, gives it a touch more functionality than just printing from a PC.
The 250-sheet drawer is supplemented by a 100-sheet rear tray, making it easy to have two different paper types or sizes loaded, and also easy to swap out the paper in the rear tray quickly if you need to print on yet another type or size. Both accept up to legal size paper. As with most printers today, the GX5020 also offers auto duplexing.
Canon recommends a monthly duty cycle for the printer of 200 to 3,300 pages. However, 1,400 pages (70 per workday on average) would be the maximum if you don't want to be adding paper more than about once a week.
The GX5020 is compact enough to share a desk with, so you can easily reach the output tray or see messages on the control panel's two-line LCD. It weighs 19.8 pounds and measures just 13.1 by 15.8 by 25.2 inches (HWD) with the input and output trays fully extended. It's also easy to share, thanks to connection choices that include Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct, as well as USB. For my performance tests, I connected via Ethernet.
Physical setup and software installation were both straightforward. After you remove the packing material, pour the bottled ink into the tanks, install paper, and connect the power cord, the instructions send you to the Canon website to download and install the driver setup routine. After downloading, the rest of the setup is mostly automated, including the alignment step. The only potential hiccup is that to connect via Ethernet, you have to know that you need to enable the feature through the front panel first.
For mobile printing, Canon's app lets you print documents or photos from your phone or tablet, and print easily from cloud sites. It even adds what you might think of as a minimal copy feature, letting you take a picture of a document on your phone and print it in one step. Note that if you connect the printer to your PC via Ethernet, you have to connect your mobile device via the same network rather than using Wi-Fi Direct to connect directly to the printer.
Canon rates the GX5020 at 24ppm for monochrome black pages and 15.5ppm for color. In our performance tests, using our standard testbed, it was a bit slow for the ratings, coming in at 20.6ppm (32 seconds) for our 12-page Word text file, not including the first page. For comparison, that's essentially tied with the Canon Maxify iB4120, but a few seconds slower than either the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7310, which managed 23.6ppm (28 seconds), or the Lexmark C3426dw, which came in at 26.4ppm (25 seconds). Note that all three of these printers are also rated at either 24ppm or 25ppm for monochrome printing, and that the C3426dw is a color laser. The iB4120 and WF-7310 are both inkjets.
Of course, even a few seconds difference every few pages can add up for long documents, but that only matters if you actually print long documents. These numbers also leave out the time for the first page, which has a big effect on total speed when printing just a few pages. The GX5020 has the advantage for one- or two-page files, with a first page out (FPO) time in our tests of 7 seconds. The C3426dw and iB4120 both came in with a 10-second FPO, while the WF-7310 took 12 seconds.
On our business applications suite, which adds files that include graphics and color, the GX5020 took 3 minutes and 26 seconds (7.3ppm), essentially tying the iB4120 for slowest in this group. The WF-7310 was a bit faster, at 2:54 (8.6ppm), while the C3426dw was enough faster to notice, at 2:13 (11.3ppm). On our photo suite, the GX5020 averaged 48 seconds for a 4-by-6-inch photo.
Text quality in our tests was in the top tier among inkjets. Edges on characters were just short of laser-printer sharp, and almost all fonts in our tests that are likely to be used in standard business documents were well-formed and highly readable at 4 points. The only two exceptions were easily readable at 5 points. One of the heavily stylized fonts, with thick strokes, was highly readable and well formed at 8 points, which is a match for most lasers. Another was readable at 8 points, but loops tended to fill in. Unless you use small fonts, you won't see a problem.
Graphics at the default quality setting showed subtle banding in fills with dark colors, and more obvious banding for gray and black fills. But colors were vibrant and nicely saturated; edges were crisp; and thin lines, including a single-pixel-wide line on a black background, held up well. Photos on the recommended Canon Glossy II photo paper were at the high end of drugstore quality, with suitably neutral color, good color saturation, and no visible banding.
Last up: our water-resistance tests, which consist of putting a few drops of water on output printed at least 24 hours earlier and gently wiping it off. On plain paper, both color and black ink smudged only slightly, but dried to show obvious water stains in graphics. On Canon's recommended photo paper, the color ink offered good water resistance, but black ink showed obvious smudges. Very much on the plus side, both black and color ink on plain paper stood up to a highlighter pen without smudging.
The Canon Maxify GX5020 combines top-tier inkjet output quality, particularly for text, with a running cost that Canon claims is less than 2 cents per page (or per "page image," if you're printing on both sides). But Canon is being conservative here. The actual cost for the ink, which is what most running-cost claims are based on, works out to be 0.5 cent per monochrome black page and 0.7 cent per color page. And that's before you take the full-size ink bottles included with the printer into account.
As always, however, keep in mind that a low running cost doesn't necessarily save money. What you need to look at is the total cost of ownership, meaning the running cost over the printer's lifetime, plus the initial cost. (See How to Save Money on Your Next Printer for how to estimate total cost of ownership.)
If you won't be printing enough for the Maxify GX5020's low cost per page to lower the total cost, consider instead the Maxify iB4120, which is our top pick for lighter-duty printing in a micro or home office. It offers a higher running cost over time, but a lower initial purchase price. The Lexmark C3426dw is also a good alternative, with the benefits of laser-crisp output for text and faster speed. And if you need to print on tabloid-size paper, also consider the WF-7310, which is our top pick for tabloid-size printing in a micro or home office.
That said, some folks will print enough for the low ink cost to pay off in the long run. For them, the GX5020's mix of speed, output quality, and paper handling makes it an easy Editors' Choice pick for a single-function color printer for heavy-duty printing in a home office.
A workhorse single-function printer, the Canon Maxify GX5020 stands out for its low cost per page, paired with print speeds and paper capacities that actually let you take full advantage of the potential savings.
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M. David Stone is a freelance writer and computer industry consultant. He's a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a top company in the gaming industry. David has significant expertise in imaging technologies (including printers, monitors, large-screen displays, projectors, scanners, and digital cameras), storage (both magnetic and optical), and word processing.
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