Canon's Maxify MB2720 Wireless Home Office All-in-One Printer ($199.99), a new addition to the company's series of small-biz inkjets, provides good output quality and paper handling for micro or home offices. It can't handle as heavy-duty paper loads as the line's new flagship model, the Canon Maxify MB5420, and lacks a few of its features, but it comes in at a much lower price and represents a better value. In fact, the MB2720 replaces the Epson Workforce WF-3640 ($214.99 at Amazon) as our Editors' Choice all-in-one printer.

While Canon's Pixma line has features geared to both household and home-office use, making many of its models suitable for dual use as home and home-office printers, Maxify printers are focused on business, with the MB2720 and other lower-end models targeted at full-time home offices, sole proprietorships, and offices with a few employees. The line lacks some consumer-friendly features such as a media card reader or a dedicated tray for printing photos, but adds fax capabilities and other business features.

Design and Features
The MB2720 prints, copies, scans, and faxes, and can print from or scan to a USB thumb drive. This matte-black printer measures 12.6 by 18.3 by 18.1 inches (HWD), and weighs 26 pounds. Paper capacity is a generous 500 sheets, split between two 250-sheet trays that hold up to legal-size paper. The MB2720 includes an automatic duplexer for two-sided printing. Its maximum monthly duty cycle is up to 20,000 pages, with a recommended monthly duty cycle of up to 1,250 pages, making it a good fit for a micro or home office. (The MB2720's maximum duty cycle exceeds that of the model it's replacing, the Canon Maxify MB2320 Wireless Inkjet Small Office All-in-One Printer ($298.00 at Amazon) , which has a 15,000-sheet monthly max. It falls short of the MB5420, with a 30,000-page maximum duty cycle.)

On top of the printer is the letter-size flatbed, plus a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) from which you can scan documents up to legal size. Unlike the Canon MB5420, which supports two-sided, single-pass scanning from its ADF, the MB2720 is limited to simplex (one-sided) scanning.

The 3-inch color touch-screen LCD, built into the beveled panel in front of the ADF, provides easy access to multifunction printer (MFP) features. Physical buttons include On, Home, Stop, a Back button with a back-arrow icon, and a pair of Start buttons with diamond-shaped icons for black-and-white and color scanning.

Connectivity and Mobile Printing
The MB2720 is AirPrint compatible and Mopria certified for direct printing for iOS and compatible Android devices, and can print from the Canon Print app as well. From the printer, you can access Maxify Cloud Link—which lets you print pictures from online photo albums, office templates, and more, even without a computer, and upload scanned documents directly to Evernote, DropBox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. It also supports Google Cloud Print, which lets you send documents to your printer from any Web-connected computer, smartphone, or device. To the left of the output tray is a port for a USB thumb drive.

The MB2720 can connect to a network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and directly to a computer via USB. I tested it over an Ethernet connection with drivers installed on a PC running Windows 10.

Print Speed
In printing out the text-only (Word) portion of our new business applications suite, the MB2720 averaged 18.9 pages per minute (ppm), with an average first-page-out time of 6 seconds. In printing our full business suite—which includes PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files in addition to the aforementioned Word document—the MB2720 averaged 8.2ppm. These speeds are slightly faster than those of the MB5420, which averaged 7.8ppm in printing the full suite, 17.1ppm for text-only printing, and had a first-page-out time of 9 seconds.

Results from our new test suite aren't directly comparable to those of printers we tested with our old business applications suite. The MB2720's speed, however, is likely similar to that of its predecessor, the MB2320—a speed I described in its review as fairly typical of an inkjet of its price.

See How We Test Printers

Running Costs
Running costs, based on Canon's price and yield figures for its cartridges, are 2.7 cents per monochrome page and 8 cents per color page. They are low for an inkjet of its price and capabilities, matching the running costs of the MB2320 and lower than those of the Epson WF-3640 (3.2 and 11.4 cents per monochrome and color page, respectively), though higher than those of both the Canon MB5320 and MB5420 (1.5 and 7.1 cents). The Brother MFC-J985DW has considerably lower running costs than any of these models—a penny per monochrome page and 4.7 cents per color page—but with a 100-sheet paper capacity is strictly for light-duty use, and its output quality is no match for the MB2720's.

Output Quality
Overall output quality for the MB2720 in our testing was above par for an inkjet, with above-average text and photos, and slightly above-par graphics. Text quality should be fine for any business use, except possibly for documents requiring tiny fonts.

With graphics, the only problem I saw worth mention was mild banding (a regular pattern of faint striations) in several illustrations. The printer did well in showing gradients and thin lines, and in differentiating between tints of similar colors.

Most of the test photos I printed with the MB2720 were of higher quality than what you might expect from drugstore prints. In one print, I noticed a loss of detail in some bright areas.

Overall output quality was better than on the Epson WF-3640 which, although like the MB2720 printed excellent text for an inkjet, couldn't match its photo or graphics quality.

Conclusion
The Canon Maxify MB2720 Wireless Home Office All-in-One printer offers a winning mix of moderate price, strong paper handling, solid speed, a good set of mobile printing features, and above-par output quality as a color inkjet MFP for a micro or home office. Although it lacks a few features found in the Epson WF-3640 such as Wi-Fi Direct and a duplexing ADF, the MB2720 has better output quality and lower running costs. It takes the WF-3640's place as our Editors' Choice.

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