Canon PIXMA TR8520 Wireless Home Office All-In-One Printer with PGI-280XXL and CLI-281 4 Pack

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Ive been using this printer for about a month. Pros: good price, good print quality. Very easy setup if youre printing over the wireless network. Scanning functionality good. Cons: I have two major gripes with the design/functionality 1) The front panel/flap has to be left open -- very far open -- for the printer to function. It is such an odd design decision. So a flap is always "sticking out" the front of your printer. It just looks like a mistake. 2) The printer comes delivered with "Auto Print" turned off. What does that mean? Lets say you havent used the printer in several hours and you decide to print something wirelessly. You cant. You first have to physically walk to the printer and essentially "wake" it up so its ready to print via wireless. You can change this setting, but not without downloading printer software to your computer and changing the setting. It took me at least two hours to research, figure it out, and fix it. This should be the default setting OR it should be easy to change through the printer control panel.

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The PIXMA TR8520 is my 6th Canon printer. Prior to this purchase Id been using the PIXMA MX922. This was a workhorse of a printer. I have a home office and it lasted 5 years with daily use. I had contacted CANON and although the MX922 is still currently available, they recommended the TR8520. So here are the issues... 1.The front feed tray holds very few sheets of paper, necessitating that you stop and reload constantly. IF you put too much paper in the tray, the printer jams. I clear so many paper jams; unlike the MX922 which almost never jammed 2. Although my work output is about the same, the TR8520 uses up ink 3 times as fast as the MX922. This printer is costing me a fortune in ink. 3. The printer is anything but solid. Compared to the MX922 the TR8520 is feels cheaply made. I would be shocked if this printer lasted even a year. Canon should be ashamed in coming out with such a poorly made printer, thats marketed for Home Office use. Im contacting CANON to see if theyre going to make this right. Otherwise, theyve lost a customer.

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I had been putting off getting rid of my PIXMA MX870 for a while as I did not like the thought of a new all-in-one printer not having a rear tray which the newer PIXMAs did not seem to have until this one came along. I am no network expert but had no problem getting this printer set up and installed on my home network and it now can be seen by any device on the network and they can print wirelessly to it. I have always been a fan of Canon for their photo quality and have been hesitant to stray because of that. Im glad to report that this one does have the photo quality I need but it also has a lot of features that make it an excellent home printer. I just finished printing over 100 Christmas cards and had it address the (smallish) envelopes. No jams, excellent color, and very fast printing. The size of the unit is deceptive. It has a small footprint but still does everything an all-in-one should be able to do. Ive done a fair amount of scanning using both the feeder and the flatbed and both worked well. The touch screen is much easier to navigate than my old MX870 which was quite confusing. Have not tried to fax yet but I did hook up a phone line.

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I had issues setting up the printer using the instructions that came with the "quick start" guide to print from my two Macs. As instructed I downloaded the setup software from Canons website, and no matter what I tried the software would not find my printer. Heres what I ended up doing. (1) connected to my wifi network using the printer’s control panel. The printer had no issues connecting to my network. I reran the setup software: no luck finding my printer. (2) I used the printer control panel to check for a firmware update and waited as the firmware was downloaded and installed over my wifi network. Tried the setup again, no dice. (3) I went to System Preferences, Printers and Scanners on each of my Macs, and the Canon printer was available to be added as an "AirPrint" printer. I added them to each of my Macs and was able to print wirelessly. I also tried AirPrint from my iPhone, and it had no issues printing. It’s too soon to tell how I like the printer, but so far it’s working fine.

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This printer is a tale of three firmware versions. Out of the box, it had a largely non-functional firmware release. I spent an hour trying to get the printer to show up on my wireless network, including multiple reboots of the printer and my computer. Even firmware update was a hassle out of the box. But finally the firmware update succeeded and the printer got better (it would appear on my WIFI) but was still not great. For that first week, the printer frequently disconnected from my network and rarely worked when I wanted to use it over WIFI. The only solution was to power cycle it and then it would appear on the network and work again for a day or two. Then the third firmware release came out and now it works like a dream! Hopefully if you’re reading this now, the printer will work great for you from day 1. This printer prints great text. The text is dark and crisp and looks terrific. I love that it has a paper tray that can hold about 30 sheets of heavy paper. Rather than having the paper drooping over an upright support beam (and inevitably bending), it stores flat in the paper tray. The printer has a color touch screen that makes it very convenient to program. Double sided printing works great with no intervention: it prints on one side and then pulls the page back in and prints to the other side. Photo printing worked well too. I printed the same photo on this and my trusty Canon 9000 MarkII photo printer. The Canon 9000 printout was visibly better to my eye but most people wouldn’t notice a difference. In fact, my wife preferred the printout from the TR8520 until I showed her how the colors in the shadows were kind of blotchy. The camera supports WIFI and printed without problem from both my Windows 10 laptop and my MacOS X High Sierra laptop. Thanks to AirPrint, you can even print directly from an iPhone. It’s pretty convenient to find a web page or recipe online on your phone and quickly get a full page printout! One thing you can’t do from your iPhone is print photos directly from the Apple Photos app. The app will insist on trying to print the picture on “letter” sized paper. To work around this, you use the Canon “PRINT” app. Within this app, you can see all of your photo albums and do things like filter on date to reduce the list. Unfortunately, when you filter on date, the app still shows folders that have zero pictures within that date range, now with a (0) next to each of them. But at least everything is in alphabetical order so if you know what you’re looking for, you can find it. Within Canon PRINT, you can rescale your photo, select the paper type and size and scale your image to get the perfect outcome. Once I got over the annoyance of having to use a separate app, I came to appreciate the added flexibility that it gave me in getting my picture “just right”. The app has worked great so far. Other than the bad out-of-box experience, I have nothing but good things to say about this printer. Scanning and photo copying work well, printouts are fast and quiet and look really good, and it doesn’t take up much space. I’ve tried Epson printers in this price-point and they have more features but do not print at the same level of quality as the Canon. I’ll choose quality over features almost every time.

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Canon PIXMA TR8520 Wireless Home Office All-In-One Printer with Scanner, Copier and Fax: Airprint and Google Cloud Compatible, Black This is my 4th or 5th Canon printer, the last 3 of which were wireless MFCs/Pixma MXseries. I had no real issues with any of them. To put it simply, I hate this TR8520. It would take far too long to enumerate all of the negatives and problems I have encountered so Ill try to bypass a lot of detail and cut to the chase. Setting up just the printer is pretty straight forward, however, the software and network set up is a nightmare; particularly getting the wireless LAN and PC to recognize and function with each other. BTW..I did my set up via the provided CD. All in all, over 3 hours of troubleshooting and doing work-arounds as it would have taken me into 2018 to read the online manual. I honestly cannot say how much of the hassle can be attributed to W10, (always a hassle) or Canon, but I can say that everything about this printer has been made far too complicated than it need be. Even just adding or refilling paper requires registering the paper each time. Just about all functions need several steps to complete. For starters, the printer itself is no where near the build quality of its predecessors. Its lightweight plastic and very flimsy with easy to break parts. The design is really poor; the info panel must be pulled out and up in order to perform any function yet once it is extended, you cannot easily get to the paper tray..or..once you extend the output tray extension, the paper tray itself comes along for the ride. I should mention that my previous MX870 started to fail a week before Christmas, a time when I have 200 mailings for my small non profit, as well as end of year reports, etc. I received this one from Amazon pretty quickly but the end result was a very challenging and tedious rate of production. It prints pretty quickly, however, the response time before it "obeys a command" is ridiculously slow. It is almost as though the printer has to think about whether or not it will comply before performing the task and thats after youve had to go through several (unnecessary) steps to get there. I have not even attempted setting up the fax or smart phone apps as Im still behind in the work load department. I have also just completed a firmware update but do not yet know if it will have any impact on performance. Nor have I had time to play with photos, etc. Ink is expensive and diminishes quickly. In the event there are significant improvements over time, I will update this review..for now: NO, I would not recommend the Canon TR8520 at any price (just dropped 20 bucks today) and Id give anything to have my old MX870 back.

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Avoid this printer. Its OK if you print just a few pages a week. But if you use it a lot the cost of the ink will quickly exceed the cost of the printer because replacing the Canon cartridges after a couple hundred pages will cost about 50% as much as the printer cost. At this time there are no aftermarket cartridges available for it. Ive been using inexpensive aftermarket cartridges on Epson and HP printers for more than 20 years with no problems. I wish I would have looked into their availability for this printer before I purchased it. As it is, Ive gone back to using my HP and Epson printers while the TR8520 printer is waiting for aftermarket cartridges to become available.

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Great printer. Easy to set up, including the wireless options. Have been using it for weeks and love it. Copies are crisp, colors are true. Speed is fine for a home printer for single copies of most things. Ink is no more expensive than for HP printers, maybe even cheaper. My only complaints are minor ones - 1) you have to turn it on manually if it shuts itself off after a certain period of time (its supposed to turn itself on when a copy is demanded by your computer, but this feature doesnt seem to work) and 2) The paper tray only holds about 40-50 sheets of paper. Scanner works great. Havent used the fax option.

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While it is a very nice size and price, this is a staggeringly slow printer. Even in lowest quality mode it chugs away, thinking deeply. If you print more than extremely short documents (ie more than 2 pages), this is not the right printer for you. --- Update: Ive used this printer for 8 months now and have grown to hate it. Apart from being very slow, it is wasting ink. Last week I installed all new XXL cartridges. I then printed about 100 pages of black and white, text-only documents . I checked and double checked that I had specified that the documents were to be printed in black and white, not colour. Today I have a warning message - the blue ink is almost depleted, and the magenta cartridge is also down to about ¼ full. I have printed literally *nothing* using these colours, yet the printer has used up two $25 cartridges. Ive had it and am buying a new printer. And it will DEFINITELY not be a Canon!

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I read the reviews before purchasing this. I knew setup might be a challenge. I did not expect the hellish circles this puts you through. Its like their IT engineer hates people. Not dislikes, HATES. Like "I cant go around murdering people, but I can do this...." type of hate. Now, if you are one of those people who enjoys playing digital Marco Polo with stuff on your wireless LAN, you may enjoy the constant loop of "Do this..." on you printer screen (and it says CONNECTED) then click continue on the software setup. After that, it cant find the printer on the network. The printer that JUST SAID CONNECTED. But wait, there is more. The installation software repeatedly tells you how to get your printer connected to the network (that it is indeed telling you that its connected) then try again. And fail. But not that quickly, oh no. You get to enjoy their version of the hated spinning hourglass for another 5 minutes before it fails. And gives you the same steps to repeat that just failed. Over and over. While I would like to sit here and tell you about the quality of the printing... I cannot get it set up. Its stupid to have this in 2018. Every other component connected to this network works just fine. Click on the network, enter in the password, connected, and working. This piece of garbage? Not so much. Its going back in the box, and back to Amazon. I refuse to support a company that will not even make a wireless setup as simple as the rest of the world manages to. At this point, I dont care if it prints the best images in the world. The only other thing I can add is that the plastic is frighteningly chintzy. I thought people might have been overly critical, but everything feels like its going to break. Not even slightly kidding. Its extremely thin, and feels like everything can snap right off. Lets see how the return goes after the ink cartridges have been installed. *UPDATE* I figured I would give this another shot. At this point I feel like the "Easy Wireless Connect" verbiage on the computer screen is mocking me. Despite the printer being successfully connected to the network, the installation fails. Okay, trying the USB method (Be aware this printer does NOT come with any USB cables, and its the old huge square style). Guess what? Still fails. Time to call Canon Tech Support and spread the misery. So after wading through everyones favorite computer guided menu... that got almost everything wrong... I finally convinced it that I was indeed calling for technical support on a Pixma 8520 printer. The response? I am sorry, were closed. There is a good chance that there will be a Canon Pixma 8520 bullet test in the very near future on YouTube. I seriously cannot convey the level of hate I have for this printer. Please, please, please heed this warning. It will ruin your day. Oh, and the "print from your smartphone" software from Canon needs GPS location to work...(among other strange permissions for printer software). So, basically spyware. I am not surprised.

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