Canon has the cheapest refillable ink tank printer on the market right now

By Desire Athow
published

A clever ploy to get rid of pesky compatible consumables vendors

Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank - $149 at Adorama (opens in new tab)

Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank - $149 at Adorama (opens in new tab)
If you are looking for a workhorse printer at a bargain price, you won't find anything better than the Pixma G1200 Megatank from Canon. The specs are more than decent and you won't run out of ink any time soon.

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Brother, Epson, Canon and HP have embraced refillable ink tank printers (opens in new tab) with great enthusiasm.

Going by the names of MegaTank, Inkvestment, EcoTank or Smart Tank, these models all try to achieve the same objective: the printer (opens in new tab) equivalent of bottomless drinks. In other words, being able to print and print without having to refill your printer (or swap ink cartridges).

In this arena, the Canon Pixma G1200 MegaTank (opens in new tab) is the cheapest around. Costing a mere $149 at Adorama, it's far cheaper than cartridge-based printers and ideal as a small business printer (opens in new tab).

The G1200 features four ink tanks, with a full refill costing about $60. Canon claims it ships with enough ink to do the work of 30 traditional ink cartridge sets, which is equivalent to around 6000 black pages or 7000 color pages.

On the down side, it may not be the fastest of printers (opens in new tab), with a rated output of just nine pages per minute at a resolution of up to 4800 x 1200dpi - although it does offer borderless printing. Its output paper tray is similarly lightweight at 100 sheets.

While it doesn’t solve two recurring issues associated with inkjets - the clogging of heads and the soggy paper syndrome - the use of the continuous ink system translates into much cheaper printing costs.

Note, the G2200 all in one printer is $10 extra (at $159 (opens in new tab)) and offers scanning and copying as well - an excellent upgrade. Unfortunately, neither the G1200 nor G2200 offer wireless printing or Google Cloud print.

TechRadar is rounding up all the top deals over the Prime Day sales period, and we’ve put all the best Prime Day deals in an easy-to-navigate article to help you find the bargains you’re looking for.

Desire Athow
Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

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