If your phone or tablet offers NFC, and you're looking for an inkjet multifunction printer (MFP) that will let you take advantage of the feature, count the Canon Pixma MG6620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer ($149.99) as a potential candidate. Aimed mainly at home use, but also suitable for light-duty use in any size office, the MG6620 ($220.99 at Amazon) delivers acceptably high-quality output, and it goes just a bit beyond the basics for MFP features, with NFC as its most significant extra.

Aside from NFC support, the MG6620 is a near-twin to the Canon Pixma MG5620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer ( at Amazon) . However, it's slightly faster and adds the ability to print from memory cards. Like the Canon MG5620, it leaves out such office-centric features as a fax capability and an automatic document feeder (ADF), which you'll find in printers like the Brother MFC-J470DW ($179.00 at Amazon) , our Editors' Choice low-cost home MFP or home and home-office MFP, and the Brother MFC-J870DW, which is our top pick for a micro or home office, and also includes NFC.

The lack of an ADF limits scanning to manually placing each page on the letter-size flatbed to scan one at a time, which is one of the key issues that makes the MG6620 better suited to home use than the office. Paper handling for printing is also limited, with only a 100-sheet capacity. However, the printer includes a built-in duplexer (for two-sided printing), which is a welcome extra that can save paper.

Basics

Basic MFP features include the ability to print and scan. You can also print from, but not scan to, memory cards. There's no USB Type A port, so you can't do the same with USB memory keys, and you can't print over a USB cable from PictBridge cameras. However, the MG6620 supports Wireless PictBridge, and Canon says this will let you print wirelessly from its most recent cameras with Wi-Fi. The bad news is that the feature currently doesn't work with cameras from any other manufacturer.

Aside from NFC, the connection choices for the MG6620 are limited to USB and Wi-Fi, including an equivalent of Wi-Fi Direct, which Canon calls Access Point mode. Connect the printer to your network by Wi-Fi, and you can connect to it through an access point on the network. Connect it to a single PC via USB cable, and you can use Access Point mode to connect instead. Either way, you can use Canon's free app to both print from and scan to iOS, Android, and Windows phones and tablets.

If your phone or tablet supports NFC, you can also simply tap the phone to a clearly marked spot on the printer to establish the connection. Or at least you can do that once you've set everything properly on the phone and printer. With other NFC printers I've tested, the feature worked without my needing to change any settings. With the MG6620, I had to call Canon for help to get the feature working.

The MG6620 supports printing through the cloud. Note that for the feature to work, the printer has to be connected directly to a network that's connected to the Internet.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality

For my tests, I connected the MG6620 to a Windows Vista system by USB cable. Setup was absolutely standard.

On our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), the MG6620 came in at 2.7 pages per minute (ppm), which is just a tad faster than the Canon MG5620, at 2.6ppm. That's a tolerable speed for light-duty printing, but it's a lot slower than the Brother MFC-J870DW (4.7ppm) or the Brother MFC-J470DW (4.9ppm).

The good news is that the MG6620 is a lot faster relative to the competition for photos, averaging 53 seconds for a 4 by 6. That's a match for the MG5620 and a few seconds faster than either Brother model.

The output quality is typical for an inkjet MFP for text, graphics, and photos. Text quality is good enough for most business use, falling in the middle of a tight range that includes the vast majority of inkjet MFPs. Graphics output, similarly, is easily good enough for most home and business needs. Most people would consider it good enough for handouts that need to make a good impression on business customers, to convey a sense of professionalism. Photo quality is roughly what you would expect from high-quality drugstore prints.

See How We Test Printers

If you can do without office-centric features and NFC, be sure to consider the Canon MG5620, which gives you essentially the same speed, output quality, and MFP features as the Canon Pixma MG6620 Wireless Photo All-In-One Printer for a lower price. If you need an ADF or fax capability, either the Brother MFC-J870DW or the Brother MFC-J470DW will work for you, though only the first has NFC. That said, if you can benefit from having NFC support and don't need office-centric features, the MG6620 will give you somewhat better graphics quality than either of the Brother printers, plus high quality and fast speed for photos, making it a potentially good choice for home or for home and light-duty home office use.

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Further Reading

• What to Do if Windows Can't Connect to Your Printer
• How to Recycle or Donate Your Old Printer
• New 3D Printing Method Takes Seconds
• Ford Creates 3D-Printed Locking Wheel Nuts Using Driver's Voice
• 3D Printing Helps Recreate Voice of 3,000-Year-Old Mummy