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Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer - Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer
4.0 Excellent

The Bottom Line

The Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer offers above par text and photo quality with reasonably high quality graphics, and it prints on optical discs.
Best Deal£439.95

Buy It Now

£439.95

Pros & Cons

    • Above par output quality for text and photos.
    • Duplex (two-sided) printing.
    • Prints on optical discs.
    • Wi-Fi.
    • No wired network support.
    • Slow for business applications.

How you feel about the Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer ($349.99 at Amazon) will depend largely on how focused you are on output quality. Compared with the Editors' Choice HP Officejet 6100 ePrinter , for example, it's slower, has a lower paper capacity, and offers fewer features. On the other hand, it delivers notably better output quality, with better text and photos than most ink jets. If output quality is your key concern, that's enough to make it a strong contender for home or light-duty personal use in any size office.

In addition to its high-quality output, the iP7220 offers a few features that go beyond the basics, but not by much. As the name suggests, it supports Wi-Fi, for example, and it also supports AirPrint. However, there's no Ethernet support, so Wi-Fi is your only choice for connecting to a network, and there's no Wi-Fi Direct, so you can't connect directly to the printer from your smartphone or tablet.

Paper handling is limited, but better than you might expect at this price. The 125-sheet input capacity is supplemented by a photo tray that can hold 20 sheets of 4 by 6 photo paper, which means you can print photos without having to swap out paper in the main tray. Two other noteworthy extras are the automatic duplexer (for printing on both sides of a page) and the ability to print on printable optical discs, although you may have to check the onscreen manual to figure out where the disc printing options are hidden in the software that ships with the printer.

Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer

Setup and Speed

Setting up the iP7220 was standard fare. For my tests, I connected it by USB cable to a system running Windows Vista. The speed for business applications is best described as a little slow but within a tolerable range for a home or home office printer. On our business applications suite, I timed it (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at an effective 2.5 pages per minute (ppm), making it only about 70 percent as fast as the Officejet 6100 ePrinter, at 3.6 ppm, and even slower compared with the slightly more expensive Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce 60 , at 4.1 ppm.

Making up somewhat for the speed for business applications is the printer's photo speed, which averages a reasonably fast 1 minute 5 seconds for a 4 by 6. That makes it essentially tied with the Officejet 6100 for photo speed, and about twice as fast as the WorkForce 60.

Output Quality

Also helping to make up for the slow speed for business applications is that the output quality is above par overall, with better text and photo quality than most inkjets and par quality graphics. The text isn't quite a match for a typical laser, and I wouldn't use it for, say, a resume. However, its far more readable at small font sizes that most ink jets can manage, and it's good enough for almost any business use.

Graphics quality is dead on par for an inkjet, which makes it easily good enough for any internal business use, including PowerPoint handouts. As with many printers, the iP7220 has a tendency to lose thin lines against a solid dark background, but depending on how critical an eye you have, you may consider the quality good enough for output going to an important client or customer. Photo quality is in the top tier for inkjets that aren't aimed specifically at photo enthusiasts or professionals, which makes them noticeably better than the photos you'll get from many drug stores.

As may be obvious, the most convincing argument for this printer is its output quality, with better looking text and photos than most inkjets deliver, and reasonably good-looking graphics output as well. If you don't need the high quality output, the HP Officejet 6100 will give you faster speed and more features for the price, but if output quality matters more, the Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer will likely be your preferred choice.

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Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer - Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer

Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer Review

4.0 Excellent

The Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer offers above par text and photo quality with reasonably high quality graphics, and it prints on optical discs.

Get It Now
Best Deal£439.95

Buy It Now

£439.95

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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