Canon PIXMA G3770 Review – Cheap In The Long Run

Unboxing

Today we have the Canon PIXMA G3770 all-in-one wireless printer with us – specifically, we’re provided with the Red variant. Regardless of which color you get, however, this model is the so-called “ink tank” printer that is designed for users who do lots of printing at a time. Aside from the printing function, it’s also capable of scanning and copying, which we’ll take a look at in this review.

Box contents

Bundled Inks

Inside, you have these items:

• Canon GI-71 CMYK inks
• Installation disc
• Setup leaflet
• Safety documentation
• USB-A to USB-B cable
• AC cable

Honestly, we can do away with disc drives now – virtually no modern PC these days comes with it, so it’ll be nice to see if Canon will provide a QR code to download the required software as needed. For the ink, the printer comes bundled with a set of GI-71 bottles, but there’s also a smaller GI-71S variant with roughly half the page yield.

Onboard display

B/W Ink level

Color Ink levels

The printer is very much red everywhere, but here are a few important spots: on both sides, you can see the ink level of black (left) and color (right) in real-time. The markings give users a rough idea of how much ink remains on the tank, and should the printer need a refill, you can lift open the access panel to reveal the inlets.

Specifications

Canon PIXMA G3770

Full specification is available on manufacturer’s website.

Quality Tests

To check the printing quality of the Canon PIXMA G3770, we’ve given a few samples for the printer to produce the content. We use 80gsm plain paper for the following tests.

For the color printing, admittedly it’s not the most colorful that we’ve seen. It’s pretty washed out in general – and looking closely at the cover image as shown on our website’s homepage has revealed tiny white gaps between each printed line (we manually started a cleanup process just to be sure), which isn’t ideal if picture quality is what you’re looking for.

For plain text printing, here we used the Calibri font (at 12pt font size) to demonstrate the text clarity. Texts are a tad grainy on the edges, but generally, it’s hard to spot unless you’re looking very closely. In any case, the quality is acceptable.

Scanned image

Zoomed view

The flatbed scanner onboard the Canon PIXMA G3770 supports up to 600 x 1200dpi scanning, which generates an image with a resolution of 7015 x 4960 on A4 scanning preset. Quality is good, aside from a small amount of graininess on very high zoom levels (the image above is roughly 6x zoom).

The Good

Starting with the good stuff – the Canon PIXMA G3770 is a versatile printer that does all the stuff a regular Joe could ask for – printing, copying, and scanning. For this particular model, Wi-Fi printing is also supported, making it useful in a multi-device setup, such as small office or family setting.

The biggest advantage this printer offers is the total cost of ownership or TCO in short (Canon provides a convenient TCO calculator here). Cheaper printers rely on ink cartridges that print a relatively limited amount of pages, and usually, it’s cheaper if you print very occasionally. However, assuming you print 2 pages a day, it’ll take less than 3 years to break even the TCO compared to a cartridge-based printer. The breakeven period is shorter the more you print, so it’s a very sound investment for high-volume printing use cases.

Should the tank become empty, accessing the maintenance panel is very easy. Simply lift the maintenance access panel by grabbing two integrated handles on both sides of the printer and you have access to all four ink refill points. There’s another maintenance access panel on the rear that houses the maintenance cartridge, and in this case, you can simply unscrew the panel off to perform a cartridge swap.

The Bad

However, there are a few things worth pointing out that can do with some improvement. Based on our observations, the color printing quality is not as good as we’d expect – so hopefully the next iteration can improve in this regard. If possible, perhaps a duplex printing mode would be nice, so users can save time from manually flipping the sheets to perform double-sided printing.

In terms of usability, there are two points we’d like to bring up: the first is the rather small onboard display. Granted, it’s better than the 7-segment display from the cheaper and older printers, but I’d like to see a bigger panel so it’s easier in terms of accessibility. Finally, the location of the USB Type-B port makes it very difficult to access, and for some reason, our unit has a piece of rubber that seemingly has dislodged, which ends up blocking the port somewhat. It took us a few minutes to finally line up the port, so I’d like to see this improved in the next iteration.

Verdict

For RM809, the initial cost for the printer is reasonable as far as tank-based printers go. However, the beauty of tank-based printers like the Canon PIXMA G3770 is the operating cost – for one set of GI-71 ink bundle, you can print upwards of 8,000 pages, which equates to 10 pages every day for more than two years without worrying about a new ink purchase (which is also cheap). This makes it a lot cheaper to operate in the long run – so if your work involves a lot of document printing, this should be a pretty solid option.

Special thanks to Canon Malaysia for providing the PIXMA G3770 all-in-one printer for this review.