Canon PIXMA TR8520 Review

Printers with individual ink tanks for each color are usually some of the best ink-efficient printer options available. The Canon PIXMA TR8520 All-In-One Printer has five individual ink tanks for each color. And it doesn’t slack in any category, making it one of the best wireless printers and probably the best printer in its class.

Canon PIXMA TR8520

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Related: If you want an equally powerful printer, check the Canon Pixma TR7520 review

Why We Like It – Canon PIXMA TR8520

The Canon PIXMA TR8520 wireless home office printer is modern, and stylish, and comes with a small compact design. But that doesn’t mean it lacks in the usability area. If you have an older all-in-one printer, this will be a nice upgrade in terms of overall convenience and functionality. For another model from the Canon PIXMA lineup, you can read our Canon MX492 review.

Speed

The Canon PIXMA TR8520 does have fairly good speed, even while printing high-quality images on glossy photo paper. However, other aspects of this printer do not properly contribute to its speed as well as you might expect. The front paper tray can’t hold many papers, and the automatic document feeder (a nice add-on for the price) can only hold 20 sheets at a time. As you might’ve guessed by now, it’s not really made to tackle a high volume of workload. You need the Brother INKvestment MFC-J985DW for that.

Print Quality

This Canon printer features five separate ink tanks, as we said before. So the print quality is bound to be good. You can select the max printing resolution from the Canon PRINT Inkjet SELPHY app (for Android devices) and the printer itself. The DPI on the printer is 4800 x 1200. You can get some pretty high-quality prints at that DPI range. However, it’s not as good as the Canon PIXMA G5020 MegaTank Inkjet Printer. For a printer that is great for business graphics and charts, check out our Brother MFC-J895dw review.

Efficiency

As we mentioned earlier, this printer is very efficient when it comes to ink cartridge usage. And obviously, it’s very power efficient for a mobile printing device; all inkjet printers are. The Canon TR8520 is a great fit for photo printing because of the said ink efficiency. But the cheaper Brother MFC-J805 does beat it in ink efficiency.

Advanced Features

For starters, the Canon TR8520 has many connectivity options for wireless printing. It supports both Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print. Also, you can use the Canon Print app, as said before. But, do note that it doesn’t support duplex scanning. If you would like to be able to use a flash drive or SD cards as well, check out the Canon SELPHY CP1300.

Value

At $250, the Canon TR8520 provides decent value for the money you spend on it. Voice printing using smart assistants is pretty great to see at this price. And you save a lot of money on the ink in the long run.

Canon PIXMA TR8520 Wrap Up

Overall, the Canon PIXMA TR8520 is great for both document and photo printing. It’s a printer worth upgrading to from your old all-in-one inkjet printer.