IJ Start Canon Pixma TR4522 Setup
IJ Start Canon Pixma TR4522 Setup Windows
The Canon PIXMA TR4522 Inkjet All-in-one delivers exceptional production and is packed with useful features including Amazon Alexa Voice support, making it a solid addition to low-volume home offices.
The entry-level canon PIXMA TR4522 Wireless Printer ($99.99) is designed for light-duty family and home-based-office use. As can be expected for an all-in-one at this price, it’s somewhat slow and expensive to use, but it comes with a strong set of features and prints exceptionally well, especially images. Also, as a few other printers we’ve seen lately, it includes support for Amazon’s Alexa, allowing for hands-free printing. It is a strong contender for home Office users who need a cheap AIO for easy printing, copying and scanning.
Room on your desk
Entry level home-based printers like TR4522 spend most of the time sitting idle until you urge them to squeeze out single photo, some document pages here, a copy or two there – you get the idea. Therefore Canon and its competitors design them to take up as little desk or Counter-Top real estate as possible. For this purpose, TR4522 measures 7.5 of 17.7 of 11.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 13 pounds, which is in line with its low-cost competition.
When it comes to paper handling, the TR4522 comes with 1 100-Sheet paper tray, and its manual-Duplexing automatic Document feeder (ADF) holds up to 20 Letter-size sheets. Its siblings, the PIXMA TR7520, on the other hand, holds up to 200 sheets, divided between 100-sheet front and rear washers. HP OfficeJet 3830 (the least expensive of this group) has the same number of sheets as TR4522, but cannot print double-sided pages automatically. And finally, Epson’s WF-2860 accommodates up to 150 sheets from an input source.
Canon does not publish monthly work cycle and recommended monthly print volumes specifications for its consumer-grade inkjet printer. Given its print speed rating (which I’ll discuss below), low paper capacity, and high operating costs (also coming up), you shouldn’t rely on this AIO for more than a few hundred pages each month; Although it can surely churn out more now and then you should need to.
Basic connection consists of USB 2.0 and Wi-Fi, and drivers for Android, Fire OS, iOS and Windows 10 Mobile are available. Walk-Up tasks, configuration and navigation are managed from a very basic control panel, as shown below.
Canon prices at TR4522 at 8.8 pages per minute (ppm) for black and white pages and 5ppm for color pages, which are, other than HP 3830 (8.5 ppm), the minimum print speed rating I know of. I tested TR4522 via USB from our standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional. The TR4522 printed our standard 12-page Microsoft Word test document at a rate of 8.5 ppm. It is slower than any other entry-level printer mentioned here.
Next, I have printed a set of very complex color Acrobat, Excel and PowerPoint business documents consisting mainly of embedded graphics and embedded images, and then combined these results with them from printing 12-page text documents in Previous test, to get on a score of 4.5 ppm to print our entire suite. The score falls behind the TR7520 with a negligible 0.2 ppm, and is 0.1 ppm faster than the Brother MFC-J497DW, 1.9 ppm before the OfficeJet 3830, and 2.9 ppm slower than WF-2860.
Finally, TR4522 printed our test 4-by-6-inch snapshots an average of 58 seconds, which was roughly Middle-of-the-Road (and tied with G4520) for this group of entry-level AIOs.
Not only does TR4522 print colorful and vivid images, but it also supports borderless printing on media from 4 by 6 inches up to 8.5 by 11 inches. You can also design and print polished and professional borderless flyers and brochures.
Photo output isn’t the only thing this little AIO does well, though. The text of our test documents came out well-formed and very readable, even in smaller sizes down to about 6 points. Our business graphics looked amazing, too, with evenly flowing gradients, smooth fillings, and distinctive, well-demarcated hairlines (strokes less than 1 point thick). As usual, I have no complaints about this PIXMA production.
High operating costs
Granted, most entry level models cost a lot to use, but at 8.7 cents for black and white pages and 18.7 cents for coloring pages, TR4522 is one of the most expensive I’ve seen.
Home-Printing Companion
Canon PIXMA TR4522 is a low volume printer, period. Nothing makes it clearer than its sky-high operating costs, and of course, its small paper input tray and slow print speeds. What it has to do for it, however, is exceptional print quality, voice automation, the ability to edit images from your mobile device, and automatic duplex printing, which is not a given in this price range.
If you print less than a few hundred pages each month, the high operating costs should not be so big in a deal. If you don’t need the excellent photo quality or automatic duplex printing you get with TR4522, and want to save a little on consumables, the Brother MFC-J497DW and Epson WF-2860 are both good options that won’t hit your wallet so hard in the long run. (If you print thousands of pages per month, you should spend more on the front page for a model like the PIXMA G4210 which will end up costing you much less on the road.) Otherwise, the TR4522 is a great little printer for light-duty use at home.