Canon MegaTank G3270 gets a big back-to-school price drop

The Canon MegaTank G3270 is our number one budget ink tank printer, and an ideal back-to-school choice or office upgrade if you want to save money versus traditional inkjet cartridge replacements. Impressing us for its "satisfyingly crisp" text documents and vibrant photos, I was pleased to spot Canon's MegaTank G3270 on sale for $160 (was $249) at Amazon.

Canon rates the included ink for up to 6,000 black-and-white or 7,700 color pages. It also estimates that the supplied ink could last for up to two years, although that of course depends on how much you print.

In the UK, this printer is called the Canon MegaTank G3570, which down to £178 (was £189) at Amazon. For some bizarre reason, the listing name is for Canon's DSLR camera, but I've checked - it is a printer, and it's sold by Amazon, not a third-party.

Combines color printing with a flatbed scanner and copier and supports Wi-Fi and USB connectivity. Print speeds reach 11 pages per minute in black and six pages per minute in color, while maximum color resolution is 4800 x 1200 dpi.

The real appeal isn't just the purchase price, but how much printing you can potentially get from the ink supplied with it (and how much you'll save compared to traditional inkjet cartridges).

In his four-star review, our senior printer editor Jim said: "Canon’s entry-level MegaTank AIO is aimed at the home office with few features, but lots of bottled ink and a very low running cost."

He went on to add, "It’s only slightly larger than a cartridge-based equivalent and it can print on every kind of blank media from square photo paper to fabric patches. The scanner bed enables reliable digital copying, while the inbuilt Wi-Fi means you can print from your smartphone using Canon’s excellent companion app."

For more top performers, including this MegaTank, see our guides to the best home printers and best ink tank printers.

Amazon's $159.99 price is $89 below the usual $248.99, for which you get a printer, scanner and copier along with a full set of high-yield bottled ink.

It has been cheaper in the past though. We've seen it for as low as $109 last year, but even so this is still a very good price for the back-to-school season.

If you want to save on other units, see our guide to the best printer deals we've seen this week.

You regularly print at home and are tired of replacing expensive cartridges. It's particularly well suited to families, students and home offices that need a straightforward machine for documents, schoolwork and occasional photos. Having scanning and copying built in is also very useful.

You regularly print large documents and need them finished quickly. Its 11ppm black and 6ppm color speeds are adequate for home use, but this isn't a high-speed office printer designed to churn through large workloads.

Automatic two-sided printing is the biggest feature missing from the G3270. That's worth considering if you regularly produce lengthy documents, as duplex pages require some manual intervention.

There's no automatic document feeder either, so scanning or copying a stack of pages means placing them on the flatbed one at a time.

Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.

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