Canon Pixma Printer TR4720 Review

I’ve recently been sampling new printers, after going many years without one. Now that I work exclusively at home, there’s often a need to print something for work, so having a printer, even in our digital and e-document world is very handy. The Canon PIXMA TR4720 is a color all-in-one printer that can handle everything a home office can throw at it. You can scan, print, copy, and it even has fax capability. Like most modern printers, it’s built for easy plug-and-play, easy to install, and relies on replaceable inkjet cartridges.  In this review, I’ll take a look at what it can do, what the features are and if I think this printer can be a good bet for your home office.

Canon Pixma Printer review

The TR4720 is 17.2 inches wide, 11.7 deep (16.2 inches with paper installed), and 7.5 inches tall, weighing in at 12.7 pounds. You’ll get the printer, a power cord, some documentation, and “starter” (read “partially full”) ink cartridges.

Set up

Getting this printer set up was mercifully easy and only took about five minutes. You’ll turn the printer on and make sure to download the canon Selphy app. The app does a really good job at walking you through the steps to get online and connected. You’ll essentially need to sign into your home Wi-Fi network work then install the ink cartridges.

When it came to setting things up on my laptop, it was a simple matter of opening the print window to print a document, then choosing “add printer”. The Canon printer popped right up and I was able to add it to my list of available printers and print right away.

Loading paper

The paper loads at the front of this printer. It seems like a bit of an odd configuration if I’m being honest. There are two separate flip out trays from the front: one holds the blank paper and the other is. For the document to print out on.

This is actually a huge disappointment for me in the design. A printer that is already this large and takes up such a big footprint does not need an additional side tray taking up even more space. I’m a little surprised the paper tray doesn’t live in a drawer in the bottom of the printer and that the Canon designers didn’t simply have the printer paper spit out the top where there is a receptacle for scanned documents. All in all, this printer is much larger than it needs to be, so those in small offices: be warned.

Print Features

The Canon PIXMA TR4720 is capable of standard one-sided printing, two-sided printing, borderless printing, and photo printing. Through Canon’s PRINT Inkjet/SELPHY app, you can link the printer to print wirelessly or from the cloud.
Canon claims a borderless 4×6 photo will take just over a minute to print (2:15, and a standard black and white document prints at four pages per minute (two if the document is color).
In my testing it took anywhere from about 1 minute to over 2 minutes (2:15 to be exact) to print 4×6 photos; this seemed to depend if I was printing natively from the photos app on my phone, or from the Print-Selphy app (the latter being faster).

Single documents spit our super fast in about 6-8 seconds, with a delay of about 12 seconds to send instructions from laptop to printer.
You can print letter or legal-sized paper and photos from 4×6 to 8×10, but you won’t be able to print larger paper formats like 11×17.

When I tested the print quality, I can confirm the documents are clear and legible, with no blurring, or smudging.
Two-sided printing worked very well and it handy to save paper.
When it came to photos, in truth, it was pretty tedious printing them; you’ve got to move the catch tray out of the way, remove the paper, and pinch the feeder closed to hold the photo sheets, load the paper, then flip the catch tray back into place.
Despite the manual nature of this, the photos print well, and look clear and vibrant, and tru to the originals.

Scanning

You’ll be able to scan any document that fits within the printing specs at about one page per minute. You can feed documents through the feeder or place them directly on the flatbed, and send them directly to your phone. I couldn’t find an app that would allow me to scan right to my computer, so I was forcced to scan thing to my phone and then airdrop them to myself. Not ideal, but…
Scanning only works on one side of the document, and the feeder can hold up to 20 documents—even thicker papers. It worked well in my testing, it takes about ??20 seconds to scan a single page document.
The default setting is 300 dots per inch, though you can reach 1,200 DPI through advanced settings. The max color depth for the scanner is 24 bit.

Making copies

Copying works similarly to scanning in that the printer first takes an image of the page, then (in the case of copying) prints that image back to a page.

Display and controls

The TR4720 has a number keypad and separate buttons for starting black and white vs. color and a stop button. There are also buttons to enter setup, fax, scan, and copy modes. The readout screen is a dot matrix LCD screen, which can be difficult to read depending on your angle and the amount of light in the room.
To access the ink cartridges, you’ll need to ensure the output tray isn’t blocking the door and pull open the door.
Like all cartridge printers, you’ll likely find yourself out of ink more often than you’d like, and as the color cartridge is an all-in-one, you’ll need to replace it if you use up all of a single color.

Connectivity

The printer has a cord to connect it to your computer, and you can also set it up to print via WiFi (both through your router and directly). It also works quite well with Apple AirPrint, both using my iPhone and my MacBook.

Overall review

Overall there’s a lot to like about this printer, and the downsides mainly come in the design, not the performance.
On the upside, the printer is clear, prints good quality, and there’s lots of options for paper sizes, plus photo printing. It was also easy to set up and the app seems to work well.

On the downside, the design, with trays opening everywhere, and the large footprint means it takes up more space than necessary, and there could be a better, and higher capacity paper tray, in my opinion. I was also unable to find a way to scan documents directly to my computer during my limited testing period.

But overall this printer works well and I can recommend it to you. The Canon Pixma Printer TR4720 sells for about $99USD and you can get it from Amazon.  

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