The Canon Maxify iB4120 Wireless Small Office Inkjet Printer ($149.99) is one of a relatively small number of small office/home office (SOHO) inkjet printers on the market, and it is a very good one. It has terrific paper capacity, competitive running costs, and above-par output across the board. The iB4120 is an easy pick as an Editors’ Choice budget SOHO color inkjet printer.
Design and Features
A matte-black printer with rounded corners, the iB4120 measures 11.5 by 18.3 by 18.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 21.5 pounds. Its 500-sheet standard paper capacity is enormous for a printer at its price, where few printers exceed 250 sheets. Better yet, the iB4120’s capacity is split between two 250-sheet trays, both of which can hold up to legal-size paper, so if you want to switch paper types, you don’t have to remove and refill a tray. There’s also an auto-duplexer for two-sided printing. The standard capacity of the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-5110 is 330 sheets, and the Ricoh Aficio SG 3110DNw and the HP OfficeJet Pro 8210 Printer each hold 250. On top of the iB4120 is a 2-inch, two-line monochrome non-touch display, controlled by Right Arrow, Left Arrow, Backspace, Setup, and OK (Enter) buttons.
Mobile and Web Printing Features
The iB4120 is AirPrint compatible and Mopria compliant, enabling easy printing from compatible iOS and Android devices, and can print from Windows RT and Windows 10 Mobile devices. It works with the Canon Print app for iOS and Android, as well as Microsoft Mobile Print. Using the Maxify Cloud Link utility, you can print documents from services like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive, and Dropbox, even without a computer. The iB4120 supports Google Cloud Print, which lets you send documents to your printer from any Web-connected computer, smartphone, or device.
It can connect to a network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and directly to a computer via USB. I tested it over an Ethernet connection with its driver installed on our standard printer testbed running Windows 10 Professional.
Print Speed
I timed the iB4120 at 20.8 pages per minute (ppm) in printing the text-only (Word) portion of our new business applications suite, reasonably close to its 24ppm speed rating for printing in black. On our full business suite, which includes PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files in addition to the aforementioned Word document, it averaged 7.2ppm, which should be fast enough for typical home- or micro-office use. We timed the HP 8210, the only other single-function color inkjet we’ve tested with our new suite, at a slightly faster 23.2ppm in printing the text document and 9.2ppm for the entire suite.
Output Quality
Output quality is a big strength for the Canon Maxify iB4020, with slightly above-par text for an inkjet, and above-par graphics and photo quality. Text should be okay for most any business use, except those requiring tiny fonts.
Graphics should be fine for printing PowerPoint slides, even for handouts going to people you are trying to impress with your professionalism. Several backgrounds showed minor banding (a regular pattern of faint striations), but that was the only issue that I noticed. With photos, colors were vivid, and the iB4120 also did well in printing our monochrome test print without a tint. Other prints were at least the quality you’d expect from drugstore prints, and several of them were better.
Running Costs
The iB4120 has competitively low running costs of 1.5 cents per black page and 7.1 cents per color page, based on Canon’s prices and yields for its most economical inks. These costs are particularly good for a printer at its price. The Epson WF-5110 (1.6 cents per black page and 7.2 cents per color page) and the Ricoh SG 3110DNw (1.7 cents per black page and 7.1 cents per color page) have similar costs but cost somewhat more. The HP 8210, which is priced similarly to the iB4120, has running costs of 1.7 cents per black page and 7.7 cents per color page.
Conclusion
The Canon Maxify iB4120 is a very good choice as a budget small-office color inkjet printer. Its main strengths are its voluminous paper capacity and stellar output quality. In fact, the combination of high-quality text, graphics, and photos makes it a good choice for printing basic marketing handouts, real estate listings, and the like. With two 250-sheet paper trays, you can load each with a different type of paper, saving you the trouble of having to empty a tray of one paper stock and load it with the other. The iB4120 fills a need as a budget color inkjet with strong output quality, and earns our Editors’ Choice as such.
