Cannon mg3095w Review

When I was shopping for a printer, I tried Googling printer reviews. Surprisingly, useful reviews were hard to come by. Is the era when printers were one of the pillars of IT gone forever? Wasn’t one of the major projects of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations the distribution of copy machines? Wasn’t Xerox once a leader in IT? With a touch of regret, I’m writing up a one-month review of the Cannon mg3095w all-in-one printer.

Pros

1. Price

   It’s very cheap. I bought it online for under 60,000 won. It’s even cheaper than the previous model, the mg3090.

2. A variety of functions

   It works as a printer, copier, and scanner. There’s no fax, but that’s fine. It’s cheap.

3. Inkjet

   I find the distinctive smell of printing on a laser printer extremely unpleasant. But these days, the world already has more laser printers than inkjet printers. In this climate, this all-in-one is a faint glimmer of hope.

4. Wireless printing

   You can print from mobile via the Cannon print app. I tested it on iPad, iPhone, and Android, and they all work fine. I also tested it on a Windows desktop and a MacBook. Everything works well. There was no need to even try wired printing.

5. Can print official government documents

   I would have been very sad if this hadn’t worked.

Cons

1. Fast ink consumption

   The bundled genuine standard-size black ink runs out remarkably fast. I couldn’t even print 200 sheets of A4 paper. Is this just to be expected for an inkjet printer?

2. AirPrint

   It doesn’t support Apple AirPrint. So you can only print and scan through the Cannon print app. It’s a bit of a hassle.

3. Print quality

   The print quality isn’t good. It’s just the quality you’d expect at this price. If you want to print a really important document, use a different printer.

4. Scanner quality

   The scanner quality isn’t good. Scanning with an iPhone scanner app gives far better quality. Since the scanner resolution is poor, the copy quality is naturally poor too. If you go through the process of printing a document -> copying -> scanning -> copying, the quality gets progressively more dismal. The text becomes hard to read. Of course, considering the price, it’s an acceptable level.

5. macOS connection

   I failed to operate the scanner from macOS. It just wouldn’t work. It worked on Windows. Printing works fine.

6. iPhone connection

   The initial pairing wasn’t smooth. Fortunately, once you connect it the first time, you don’t have to worry about it afterward. On Android, the initial pairing is smooth.

7. Complaints about Cannon

   It was quite hard to find a driver for desktop OSes. Searching on Google is literally my job, so are other buyers all doing okay with this?

Overall

A reasonable choice for value. But as cheap as the price is, that’s about the level of performance you get.

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