Canon Maxify GX7120 / GX7150 review: Canon’s range-topping business inkjet gets a minor refresh

You’ve maybe had the same eyebrow-raising moment that I’ve been through more often than I care to remember. You buy a reasonably priced inkjet printer, thinking you’ve made a sound financial choice. You get it home and install it, only to find that the ‘setup cartridges’ run out in no time at all, and a replacement set of cartridges costs as much or perhaps even more than the printer.

Like other Canon ‘MegaTank’ printers, this one turns that unfortunate trait of inkjet printing well and truly on its head. It’s relatively pricey to buy but runs on bottles of replacement ink to replenish the high-capacity tanks, with no cartridges in sight. Indeed, the bottles of ink, as supplied with the printer, are sufficient for printing as many as 6,000 mono and 14,000 color document pages. Switch to Economy mode and you should get 9,000 mono and 21,000 color documents.

The net result is that, over the lifetime of the printer, you should save about 90 per cent off the total cost of ownership. That’s good for the bottom line of any home/small office, as well as for shops, educational establishments, private healthcare clinics and more besides. With its speedy performance, high print quality and space-saving design, this Canon vies to be one of the best inkjet printers on the market.

Canon Maxify GX7120 / GX7150: Specifications

Canon Maxify GX7120 / GX7150: Price

Sold as the Canon Maxify GX7120 in the USA, GX7150 in Europe,  and the GX7160 in Australia. This printer takes over from its predecessor, the GX7020 / GX 7050, which was also sold as the GX7060 in Australia. 

Head to any computer store or online retailer and you’re likely to find inkjet printers for less than a tenth of the price of this one. Again, at the time of testing the printer, it was available for anything between $549 to $799 in the USA and £719 to £812, at competing retailers. That’s pretty steep for an inkjet printer but this one is built to withstand the rigors of high-volume printing in a busy office.

More importantly, replacement ink bottles cost around $27 / £14 for black and $32 / £20 for each of the three cyan, magenta and yellow colors, which equates to big savings in running costs compared with cartridge-based inkjet printer.

Canon Maxify GX7120 / GX7150: Design & Handling

With an eye firmly on the business market, and more especially the busy home office or small office, Canon has designed the Maxify GX7120 / GX7150 to be fast and efficient, while fitting into tight spaces. I like it’s relatively small footprint, which enables it to fit right in when spare space is at a premium.

That’s particularly poignant for hybrid workers who are putting a lot of hours in at home, or in shared office spaces. One thing that’s not ‘small’ is the capacity of the ink tanks on which the printer runs. They’re topped up with bottles that make the chore and expense of frequently needing to replace pricey ink cartridges a thing of the past.

Sure, the relatively high initial purchase price of this printer is hard to justify if you only create prints occasionally, but it’s really built to cater to higher-volume printing, where it comes into its own.

The new printer is firmly based on the preceding Canon Maxify GX 7020 / GX7050, and both generations look pretty much identical. That holds true not just for the physical look and feel, but also for the vast majority of features and specifications. It’s not a bad thing, considering the excellence of the previous model, but puts question marks over the need to upgrade if you already own the older version.

The main upgrades aim to track recent changes in working practices, with many people now working across different locations and in shared office spaces. As such, wireless connectivity has been revamped for greater range and stability, while the latest security measures have been applied to include TLS1.3 and WPA3-Personal protocols. And let’s face it, security is generally a very important factor for any business.

As I’ve mentioned, I like that the printer has such a small footprint and takes up little space. It is however 2.4 inches taller than its sibling Maxify GX6120 / GX6150, which shares the same print speed and most of the same features. T

he reason for the extra height is that the more up-market model features three paper feeds rather than two. These include two full-sized internal cassettes rather than just one, which slot into the front of the printer and hold up to 250 sheets of paper each. That can be a real saver of time and effort if, for example you want to stack one cassette with plain paper and the other with letterheaded stationery.

Like the other model, you still get an additional upright rear tray, which holds 150 sheets of plain paper or can be ideal for photo paper and other specialist media. A neat trick for advertising your business is that the printer can also output banners of up to 1.2m / 47” in length, using the rear input tray.

Moving on up, there’s a 50-sheet ADF (Auto Document Feeder) nestling on top of the printer. This one is for the built-in scanner, which is designed to be able to capture really fine detail, thanks to its maximum optical resolution of 1200x1200dpi (dots per inch). The scanner itself is a significant upgrade over the one in the less expensive Maxify GX6120 / GX6150, as it’s a duplex rather than simplex device. Again, there’s a lot of time and effort to be saved here, as the scanner can automatically scan double-sided documents in a single pass, rather than requiring you to manually turn over each page.

Not just for scanning, the scanner naturally enables standalone copying (again duplex as well as simplex). Another upgrade over the cheaper 6-series model is that this printer adds a standalone fax facility. As such, it boasts color Super G3 standard fax, with a 250-page memory, coded speed dialing for up to 100 locations and group dialing for 99 locations. The printer’s standalone scanning, copying, faxing and printing facilities are all brought together by a 2.7-inch color touchscreen display. To my mind, Canon is always very good at user interfaces and this one is typically intuitive and well thought out.

Let’s get back to those enhanced connectivity and security features, which are the main upgrades from the previous model. As well as the obvious USB connection to a computer, you get connectivity options that include wired Ethernet and dual-band 2.4GHz / 5GHz Wi-Fi / Wireless LAN. These come complete with an exhaustive range of protocols and security options.

Taking ‘connectivity’ even further, you can scan and print to or from the cloud, with choices that include Cloud Link, Canon Print Service Plugin (Android), Apple AirPrint, Wireless Direct Connection and Mopria (Android). There’s also support for Amazon Alexa and mobile apps including Canon PRINT Inkjet/SELPHY and Easy-PhotoPrint Editor.

In a nutshell, the wide-ranging connectivity options helps with the growing need for people to combine their efforts with remote co-workers and to keep in touch with customers, wherever they are. It’s also neat that you can also scan directly to email as well as to network folders. If you’re feeling a little more old-school, there’s also the option of scanning to or printing from a USB stick, via an easy-access socket on the front panel

Canon Maxify GX7120 / GX7150: Performance

To my mind, the much vaunted ‘paperless office’ that we talked about back in the 1990s never fully happened and businesses still need to look good on paper. This printer’s performance is excellent in that respect, with a maximum print resolution of 600x1200dpi that’s able to deliver super-sharp mono and color documents on plain paper. And when the devil is in the detail, its high-resolution output does full justice to all the small print as well as to barcodes and QR codes.

Color rendition is rich and vibrant for graphics and other images and a bonus of the pigment-based ink formulation is that prints on plain paper are very durable and resistant to smudging. They stand up well to stray water droplets and from being plastered with highlighter pens. The pigment inks also ensure that bleed through is minimized, when creating double-sided prints on plain paper, so you can make further savings by making the most of the printer’s auto duplex facilities for printing as well as for scanning.

The GX7120 / GX7150 certainly doesn’t set out to be a photo printer. For that, I’d recommend the dye-based Canon Pixma G620 / G650 / G660 MegaTank printer, sold in Europe, the USA and Australia respectively. The pigment-based inks of this Maxify printer are really geared for printing on plain paper. With glossy paper, the relatively large molecules of pigment don’t fully sink through the top shiny layer, and the results look second-best.

The 4-ink range of the printer is also less ideal for doing full justice to the extended color space of photographic images. Even so, the printer isn’t entirely shabby for photo output, and certainly includes wide-ranging support for paper types including gloss, semi-gloss and matte photo papers as well as re-stickable photo paper, magnetic photo paper and fabric iron-on transfers. And let’s not forget that ability to make eye-catching banners as well.

When you’re up against deadlines or simply have a lot of work to get through, speed is of the essence. Productivity in a business environment can take a real hit if you’re standing around, twiddling your thumbs, waiting for large numbers of pages to dawdle out of a printer. This one is impressively fast. In my tests, it lived up to Canon’s claims. It can print mono or color documents at up to 24ipm or 15.5ipm (impressions per minute) respectively. And if you’ve just got a single, simplex page to print, you’ll only have to wait for 5.5 or 7 seconds for mono or color, if the printer is switched on and ready to roll.

Scanning speeds are up to 22.2ipm for mono and 16.9ipm for color, with copying available at speeds of up to 22.2ipm for mono and 12.2ipm for color. The ability of the scanner to scan both sides of double-sided documents in a single pass via its ADF is a real speed boost. Overall performance is excellent in all respects.

Canon Maxify GX7120 / GX7150: Verdict

I reckon that the Canon Maxify GX7120 / GX7150 is pretty much perfect for any busy home office, small office or similar environment where you need fairly high-volume printing with a quick turnaround. I enjoy its wealth of printing, scanning, copying and faxing facilities, which come complete with wide-ranging connectivity and security options. The color touchscreen makes for easy and intuitive standalone use, and the multiple paper input trays and single-pass duplex scanning represent further time-saving and versatility. Print quality is excellent for both mono and color documents, understandably less so for glossy photos. The printer is undeniably expensive to buy up-front but cheap running costs literally bring a rich reward. All in all, it’s currently my favorite printer for the For the busy home or small office.

Alternatives

The Canon Maxify GX5020 / GX5050 / GX5060 is a similarly bottle-fed printer that’s equally cheap to run but it’s also cheaper to buy. That’s mainly because it’s a printer pure and simple, with no built-in scanner and only a basic mono info screen. If you don’t need scanning or copying, it’s a money-saving option.

The Canon Maxify GX6120 / GX6150 delivers most of the same attractions with the same print speed, quality and running costs. However, it only has one instead of two internal paper feed cassettes, simplex instead of auto duplex scanning, and no direct fax facility.