Canon Pixma MG5220 All-in-One Printer Review

Setup

After removing the packing materials, you need to install the print head. Although this might sound intimidating to the neophyte, it is relatively easy. The print head pops into place easily as do the five ink cartridges. When you lift the scanner cover to get started with this procedure, an animated guide is shown on the LCD to help you along.

As a matter of fact, between the Getting Started Guide, the animated setup guide on the LCD screen, the CD wizard, and the printed Network Setup Guide, getting this all-in-one going is very straightforward. Even setting up the wireless network is easy provided you know the name and password for your network. When we set everything up on a Mac, the unit printed, but it didn’t scan. Going back over the setup instructions we determined that we had missed a step. When we repeated the procedure including all the proper steps, the installation was fine.

Expect to dedicate about an hour for the installation including 20 minutes or so for the software to install. The Canon Solution Menu EX and the MP Navigator EX software are full-featured programs that have many options for printing photos and scanning images while remaining easy to use. We really liked its ability divide multiple images into separate scans, so we could load up the scanner with photos, but save each of them separately.

Canon has included their new Full HD Movie Print software which allows you to print frames from HD movies. However, you need a Canon HD EOS DSLR or Canon PowerShot camera to make this software work properly.

Part of the installation includes aligning the print head and, of course, loading the paper. The front tray, shown in Figure 10, holds 150 sheets of paper and also acts as the output tray. Because of this, the output tray is limited to 50 sheets. While some might find this restrictive, since we are usually ne
ar-by to watch large print jobs, we did not think it was too difficult to remove the paper as it neared 50 sheets. Canon recommends that you use the rear tray, shown in Figure 11, for photo paper and envelopes. This tray is double-hinged and can be folded down when not in use. This printer can handle 10 envelopes at a time and the tray will hold 150 sheets of paper.

Figure 10: Front sheet holder

Figure 11: Rear paper tray

If you have ever created a paper jam because you forgot to open the paper output tray, you will enjoy this printer. The paper output tray opens automatically when printing or copying starts and the paper is ejected. This is a feature that we would like to see on all printers.