Pros & Cons
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- High paper capacity.
- Low running costs.
- Very good text quality with most fonts.
- Good photo quality.
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- Tiny display.
- Problems with printing one of our test fonts.
- Slightly subpar graphics.
Canon Maxify iB4020 Wireless Small Office Inkjet Printer Specs
| Color or Monochrome | 1-pass color |
| Connection Type | Ethernet |
| Connection Type | USB |
| Connection Type | Wireless |
| Cost Per Page (Color) | 7.1 cents |
| Maximum Standard Paper Size | Legal |
| Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) | 30000 pages per month |
| Number of Ink Colors | 4 |
| Print Duplexing | |
| Type | Printer Only |
The Canon Maxify iB4020 Wireless Small Office Inkjet Printer ($149.99) is the only single-function printer introduced with the rollout of the company's Maxify line of small office/home office (SOHO) models, and it is a good one. It has great paper capacity, low running costs, and good text quality for an inkjet, at least with standard fonts.
Design
The iB4020 measures 11.5 by 18.3 by 18.1 inches (HWD), and weighs 21.5 pounds. It has a generous 500-sheet standard paper capacity, split between two 250-sheet trays, plus an auto-duplexer (ADF) for two-sided printing.
It has better standard paper capacity than the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-5190, our Editors' Choice heavy-duty printer for a very small office, which has a 250-sheet front drawer, an 80-sheet rear tray, and a duplexer (for two-sided printing) standard, plus the option for a second 250-sheet tray ($99.99). The iB4020 is built for lighter-duty printing, though, with a maximum monthly duty cycle of 30,000 pages, to the Epson WF-5190's 45,000.
On top of the printer is a small (2-inch), two-line, monochrome, non-touch display, controlled by right-arrow, left-arrow, and OK (Enter) buttons. I found it hard to read the display's small text.
Mobile Printing Features
The iB4020 is AirPrint-compatible, and uses the Maxify Cloud Link interface, which lets you access various cloud-based services directly from your printer. You can print documents from services like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive, and Dropbox, even without a computer. The iB4020 supports Google Cloud Print, which lets you send documents to your printer from any Web-connected computer, smartphone, or device. With the Maxify Printing Solutions app installed on your iOS, Android, or Windows RT smartphone or tablet, you can also print photos or documents from your device.
It can connect to a network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and directly to a computer via USB cable. I tested it over an Ethernet connection with drivers installed on a PC running Windows Vista.
Print Speed
The Canon Maxify iB4020 printed out our business applications suite (as timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) at 4.7 pages per minute (ppm), a decent, if unspectacular, speed at a time when some inkjets have speeds that rival or even exceed those of lasers. We timed both the Epson WF-5190 and the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-5110 at a much faster 10.3ppm.
Output Quality
Output quality is one of the Canon Maxify iB4020's strengths, with generally above-par text for an inkjet, slightly below-average graphics quality, and slightly above-par photo quality. In general, text quality is unusually good for an inkjet, except for one distinctive, yet nonstandard font in our test suite, for which the printer substituted a plain, commonly used font. (This has not happened in any other printer that I've tested.) I was able to correct this by going into Word settings and unchecking the option Embed TrueType Fonts, after which it recognized and printed the distinctive font.
Graphics quality is a touch below par, and is suitable for internal use. Whether you'd use PowerPoint handouts or formal reports printed on the Maxify iB4020 depends on how picky you are. Some backgrounds showed banding (a regular pattern of faint striations) in our tests. Thin lines were all but lost in two illustrations.
Photo quality is slightly above average for an inkjet. A monochrome photo showed a slight tint. Most of the prints we made in our tests were of at least the quality you'd expect from drugstore quality; a couple of them were better.
A strong point for the iB4020 is its low running costs: 1.6 cents per monochrome page and 7.1 cents per color page, based on Canon's prices and yields for its most economical ink tanks. The iB4020 lacks Wi-Fi Direct, which the Epson WF-5190 has. It's also considerably slower than the Editors' Choice Epson WF-5190, which, at 10.3ppm, is faster than most lasers. The two models have similar running costs and output quality. (If you don't need the PCL or PostScript drivers that the Epson WF-5190 includes, the Epson WF-5110 is otherwise identical to the Epson WF-5190 but comes in at a lower cost.)
Although it can't approach the speed of some recent inkjet printers, the Canon Maxify iB4020 Wireless Small Office Inkjet Printer offers a good mix of generous paper capacity, low running costs, solid output quality, and reasonable speed at a competitive price. If you're looking for a color inkjet printer for relatively high-volume printing in a home office or micro office, it's worthy of a place on your short list.