Canon Maxify MB2720 Wireless Home Office All-in-One Printer, a brand-new addition to the firm's series of small-biz inkjets, offers good output quality and paper handling for micro or home offices.
It can't handle as many heavy-duty paper loads as the line's brand-new front-runner design, the Canon Maxify MB5420, and it lacks a few of its features, yet it is available at a much lower price and represents a far better value. As a matter of fact, the MB2720 changes the Epson Workforce WF-3640 as our Editors' Choice all-in-one printer.
While Canon's Pixma line has functions tailored to both home and home-office usage, making many of its versions ideal for dual use as home and home-office printers, Maxify printers are focused on business, with the MB2720 and various other lower-end models targeted at permanent offices, sole proprietorships, and offices with a few workers.
The line lacks some consumer-friendly features, such as a media card reader or a dedicated tray for printing photos; however, it adds fax capabilities and other business features.
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| Canon MAXIFY MB2720 - canon.com |
Canon MAXIFY MB2720 Review
Style and Features
The MB2720 prints, duplicates, scans, and faxes, and can print from or check 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 2 250-sheet trays that hold up to legal-size paper.
The MB2720 consists of an automatic duplexer for two-sided printing. Its optimal monthly duty cycle is up to 20,000 pages, with a recommended monthly duty cycle of approximately 1,250 web pages, making it an excellent fit for a micro or home office.
(The MB2720's optimum task cycle exceeds that of the design it's replacing, the Canon Maxify MB2320 Wireless Inkjet Small Office All-in-One Printer, which has a 15,000-sheet month-to-month max. It falls short of the MB5420, with a 30,000-page maximum responsibility cycle.).
In addition to the printer, there is a letter-size flatbed, plus a 50-sheet automated paper feeder (ADF) where you can scan papers up to legal size. Unlike the Canon MB5420, which supports two-sided, single-pass scanning from its ADF, the MB2720 is restricted to simplex (prejudiced) scanning.
The 3-inch touch-screen LCD, integrated into the front panel of the ADF, provides simple access to multifunction printer (MFP) features. Physical buttons consist of On, Home, Stop, a Back switch with a back-arrow icon, and a pair of Start switches with diamond-shaped icons for black-and-white and color scanning.
Other Post: Canon PIXMA TR8620a Review
Connectivity and Mobile Printing.
The MB2720 is AirPrint-compatible and Mopria-licensed for direct printing from iOS and compatible Android devices, and can also print from the Canon Print application. From the printer, you can access Maxify Cloud Link —which lets you print images from online picture albums, office layouts, and more, and upload scanned files directly to Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
It also supports Google Cloud Print, which lets you send files to your printer from any Web-connected computer, mobile phone, or other device. To the left of the output tray is a USB thumb drive port.
Publish Speed.
In publishing out the text-only (Word) portion of our new business applications collection, the MB2720 averaged 18.9 pages per minute (ppm), with a typical first-page-out time of 6 seconds. In publishing our full-service collection — which includes PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel data along with the aforementioned Word file — the MB2720 balanced at 8.2 ppm. These rates are slightly faster than those of the MB5420, which balanced at 7.8 ppm when publishing the full collection and 17.1 ppm for text-only printing, and had a first-page-out time of 9 seconds.
Results from our brand-new examination collection aren't directly comparable to those of printers we evaluated with our old service applications suite. The MB2720's rate, nonetheless, is most likely similar to that of its predecessor, the MB2320 —a rate I explained in its review as rather normal for an inkjet at its cost.
Running Costs.
Running expenses, based on Canon's cost-and-return figures for its cartridges, are 2.7 cents per monochrome page and 8 cents per shaded web page. They are reduced for an inkjet to its rate and abilities, matching the running expenses of the MB2320 and less than those of the Epson WF-3640 (3.2 and 11.4 cents per black-and-white and shaded web page, respectively), though more than those of both the Canon MB5320 and MB5420 (1.5 and 7.1 cents).
The Brother MFC-J985DW has significantly lower running costs than any of these designs—a penny per monochrome page and 4.7 cents per color web page—yet, with a 100-sheet paper capacity, it's strictly for light-duty use, and its high-quality results are no match for the MB2720's.
