The Canon Pixma TR7820 all-in-one (AIO) is unusual. Most AIOs focus more on printing than scanning, but the TR7820 ($179.99) does the reverse. The cartridge-based print engine leads to a high running cost that makes this model best limited to light-duty printing even by home and home-office standards. But the 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF), with support for manual duplexing (two-sided scanning), makes it suitable for moderate-duty scanning and copying in a home office. In short, if you're looking for an AIO printer primarily for scanning and coping, with some light-duty printing thrown in, the TR7820 may be just what you need.

Design: Efficient Paper Handling

Weighing in at 16 pounds and measuring 8.2 by 14.8 by 13.8 inches (HWD), the TR7820 offers a small enough footprint that it won't take up much space on your desk. Even better, physical setup is easy. Just plug it in, turn it on, and follow the instructions on its 2.7-inch touch-screen control panel to insert the two ink cartridges—black and color—then wait while it runs its fully automated alignment routine. Downloading and installing the driver and other software is similarly straightforward.

Connection options are Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and USB, which I used for testing. If you want to print and scan from your phone or tablet, you can also download Canon's mobile app to your Android or iOS device. As with the Canon TS7720, which offers essentially the same print features but lacks an ADF, you can set the control panel to your choice of "scenes" with presets for the commands you use the most (see the screenshots below).

(Credit: Canon/M. David Stone)

Paper handling is a notable strength, thanks to two 100-sheet paper trays and automatic duplexing (two-sided printing). Although the front drawer is limited to plain paper at up to letter size, the rear tray can hold up to legal size, and can also handle other media, including photo paper. The tray also has the advantage of being easy to refill or empty to change to a different paper size or type quickly without having to open a drawer. In my tests, I was able to automatically duplex using letter-size paper from either tray, and was able to set the driver to auto duplex with smaller paper sizes using the front tray. When I set the driver for the rear tray, however, it would not let me set it for both duplexing and either legal-size paper or custom sizes smaller than letter size.

For scanning and copying, the TR7820 offers a letter-size flatbed and the ADF, whose manual duplexing capability can scan one side of a two-sided document, wait for you to flip the stack over and reinsert it, then scan the other side, and interfile the pages to put them the right order for either a scanned or copied document, depending on which function you're using. You can also copy both simplex and duplex originals to either simplex or duplex copies. However, note that the 35-sheet capacity is for letter-size paper only. For legal-size pages, the ADF is rated for just five sheets, and for other sizes to a single sheet.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

Canon doesn't include a maximum or recommended monthly duty cycle in the printer's specs, but the 200-sheet capacity works out to 800 sheets per month if you want to keep paper refills down to about once a week. And even if you print far fewer pages per month than that, you'll still quickly get to the point where it would be cheaper to buy a tank printer, which would mean a higher initial cost in most cases, but significant savings in ink costs.

Calculating running cost for the TR7820 is a little tricky, because—as with any printer with a tri-color cartridge—when any of the three ink colors (cyan, yellow, and magenta) runs out, you have to replace the cartridge no matter how much of the other color inks remain. With that hedge in mind, if you use the high-capacity cartridges, the standard calculation for running cost works out to 7.6 cents per black page and 19 cents per color page.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

Alternatively, you can use Canon's Pixma Print Plan, which Canon says can save 20% to 70% on ink. As is standard for ink subscription plans, the price per page is the same for mono and color pages, and the same whether you have a single text character on the page or the cover the entire page with ink, which means you'll generally save more if you print lots color graphics and photos. On the other hand, you'll pay the full price each month, even if you don't print any pages, so pick a tier carefully. (You can also carry over at least some unused pages to the next month. For more details, check Canon's site and our story on tank printers and ink plans.) Canon offers a Pay as You Go plan, but it's 20 cents per page, which means that unless you average more ink per page than a standard color test page uses, you won't save any money.

Testing the Pixma TR7820: Slow Speed, Good Quality

For judging performance in context, I chose several inkjets with similar list prices to compare the TR7820 with: the Canon Pixma TS7720, the Epson WorkForce WF-2960, and the Brother MFC-J4335DW, our current Editors' Choice pick for personal and micro office AIOs. As already mentioned, the TS7720 is essentially identical to the TR7820 for printing, but is limited to a flatbed for scanning. The other two models both offer ADFs.

On our business applications suite, the MFC-J4335DW was fastest across the board.

The Epson WF-2960 was second on each test and nearly tied for first place for the Word file, at 14ppm (52 seconds) compared with 15ppm (49 seconds) for the Brother printer. The two Canon models were essentially tied for third place, separated by only two seconds for the full suite. Each scored a few seconds faster than the other on at least one file, but the pattern of the differences for individual runs indicated this was a measure of variation from one run to the next for each printer individually rather than a real difference between the two models.

If you expect to print in duplex much, note that although the speed advantage for the Brother printer compared with the TR7820 was less than 10 seconds for printing the 12-page Word file in simplex, it grew to nearly 70 seconds when printing the same file in duplex.

For printing 4-by-6-inch photos, the TR7820 averaged 32 seconds each, which is faster than most inkjets.

Text quality for the TR7820 was a small step below top tier for an inkjet. All of the fonts in our test suite that would likely get used in a business document were easily readable at 5 points, and half were easily readable, though not as well formed, at 4 points. A quick look using a loupe showed ragged edges and uneven line widths at the small size. One of the two fonts with heavy strokes was easily readable at 12 points. The other, which is easier to render well, was both reasonably well formed and highly readable at 8 points.

For graphics on plain paper using default settings, solid black fills and both fills and gradients with bright colors were nicely saturated and punchy, but fills with some darker colors tended to look a little muddy. Most full-page graphics showed minor banding, but it was subtle in most cases, and even the most obvious banding wasn't overly distracting. Thin lines, including lines on a black background, held well. In one gradient we use because it's particularly difficult to print well, I saw only slight posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually). Photos on Canon's recommended Photo Paper Plus Glossy II were all solidly drugstore-level quality.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

Both black and color ink smudged slightly on plain paper in our water-resistance tests, but black text stood up to a highlighter with no smudging at all. On photo paper, I saw water stains after drying, but no smudging for either black or color ink.

Verdict: Scanner First, Printer Second

In our Canon Pixma TS7720 review, we pointed out that the key shortcoming for that printer was the lack of an ADF. The TR7820 earns the opposite conclusion, with its ADF being its key strength. However, its high running cost limits it to lighter-duty printing than scanning. So, if you don't need the ADF, you should consider the TS7720, which will give you an essentially identical printer plus a flatbed scanner for a lower cost. Alternatively, if you need an ADF but don't need duplex scanning, consider the Epson WF-2960 or Brother MFC-J4335DW. The WF-2960 is the only AIO in this group that supports Ethernet. And while the MFC-J4335DW's overall output quality was the lowest in this group by just a touch, it was the fastest of the four on our tests, and it offers the lowest cost per page.

However, the Brother and Epson ADFs support simplex scanning only. If you need to scan multipage, double-sided documents for schoolwork or a home office, the TR7820 is the obvious choice in this group. It's the only one that will save you from tediously scanning each side of each page, one at a time.