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Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One 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 MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer - Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer
3.0 Average

The Bottom Line

The Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer is aimed more at home use than office needs, but can also serve as a home office or personal inkjet multifunction printer (MFP).

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Pros & Cons

    • Prints, scans, and copies.
    • Has Wi-Fi and a proprietary feature equivalent to Wi-Fi Direct.
    • No wired network support.
    • No automatic document feeder.
    • No fax.
    • Slow.

Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer Specs

Color or Monochrome 1-pass color
Connection Type USB
Connection Type Wireless
Cost Per Page (Color) 12.7 cents
Maximum Scan Area 8.5" x 11.7"
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Number of Ink Colors 5
Print Duplexing
Scanner Optical Resolution 1200 pixels per inch
Scanner Type Flatbed
Standalone Copier and Fax Copier
Type All-in-one
All Specs

One of the lower-cost models in Canon's line of photo inkjet multifunction printers (MFPs), the Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer ($99.99) is meant primarily for home use. As with most inkjet MFPs, however, it can also serve for light-duty use in a home office or even as a personal printer in a larger office. More important, it's a reasonable choice for any of these roles, as well as for the dual role of home and light-duty home office printer.

The MG5620 ( at Amazon) fits best as a home printer mostly because of the features it doesn't include. Inkjet MFPs aimed at office use—like the Brother MFC-J470DW ($179.00 at Amazon) , our Editors' Choice low-cost home or home and home-office MFP—typically offer faxing and an automatic document feeder (ADF) for copying and scanning. The MG5620 doesn't offer either. To scan, you have to place paper on the letter-size flatbed manually, one sheet at a time.

Beyond that, the paper capacity, at only 100 sheets, is best suited for home or, at most, light-duty office use. One welcome extra for paper handling, however, is a built-in duplexer for two-sided printing.

Basics

Aside from printing, the MG5620's basic MFP features are limited to scanning and copying. It doesn't offer a USB Type A port or memory card slots, which means you can't print from a memory card, a USB key, or a PictBridge camera over a USB cable. However, it supports Wireless PictBridge, which, according to Canon, is also supported on all of its more recent camera models that also offer Wi-Fi, although it isn't available on cameras from other manufacturers.

A more noteworthy extra is support for mobile printing. The MG5620 doesn't have an Ethernet port, but if you connect it to your network using Wi-Fi, you can both print from and scan to iOS, Android, and Windows phones and tablets through an access point. Connect it directly to a PC via a USB cable, and you can still print from and scan to mobile devices by using the printer's Access Point mode, which is Canon's equivalent to Wi-Fi Direct. In addition, if you connect it to a network, rather than directly to a PC, the printer supports printing through the cloud.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality

Setting up the MG5620 is standard fare. For my tests I connected it by USB cable to a Windows Vista system. The speed on my tests is on the slow side for applications, but faster than typical for photos.

Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer

I clocked the MG5620 on our business applications suite (timed using QualityLogic's hardware and software), at only 2.6 pages per minutes (ppm). That makes it a bit faster than the Canon MX472, which came in at 2.3ppm, but significantly slower than the Brother MFC-J470DW or the Brother MFC-J285DW ($685.00 at Amazon) , at 4.9ppm. On the plus side, the MG5620 printed photos a little faster than either Brother printer, and also at a fast speed for its price, averaging 53 seconds for a 4 by 6.

Output quality is absolutely typical across the board. Text falls in the middle of a tight range that includes the vast majority of inkjet MFPs, making it good enough for most business needs. Graphics quality is even better relative to the competition. Not only is it suitable for most home and business use, but most people would consider it good enough for handing out to important clients or customers when they want output that makes them look fully professional. Photo quality is a match both for most inkjets and for what you would expect from high-quality drugstore prints.

Related Story See How We Test Printers

If you need an ADF or fax support, your best picks will likely be the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J470DW or the Canon Pixma MX472 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer , which offers many of the same features as the Brother model. If you don't need an ADF or faxing, but want faster speed than the Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer delivers, be sure to take a look at the Brother MFC-J285DW. If you care more about overall output quality than speed, however—particularly graphics quality—and you don't need faxing or an ADF, the MG5620 has the edge over these other models and could well be the right choice.

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Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer - Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer

Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer Review

3.0 Average

The Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer is aimed more at home use than office needs, but can also serve as a home office or personal inkjet multifunction printer (MFP).

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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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