Canon Pixma TS8320 Wireless Inkjet All-In-One Printer Review

The Canon Pixma TS8320 Wireless Inkjet All-In-One Printer ($199.99) is a consumer-grade all-in-one (AIO) photo printer designed for moderate use in a home environment.

This six-ink machine churns out not only excellent-looking photos, but also highly legible, near-laser-quality text and detailed, accurately colored business graphics.

It lacks the convenient auto-duplexing automatic document feeder of the Editors' Choice Epson Expression Premium XP-7100 Small-in-One, but is otherwise an excellent home-office companion.

All the Colors

Along with the standard cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) process colors, the TS8320 comes with pigment-black and photo-blue inks.

The pigment-black darkens text and makes black areas in photos and graphics deeper.

And, according to Canon, the photo-blue ink improves definition (by helping to eliminate graininess) and increases the color range.

Like the Pixma TS8220 before it, the TS8320 comes in three colors: black, red, and white (Canon sent me a white one).

At 5.6 by 14.7 by 12.6 inches (HWD) and weighing 14.6 pounds, it's the same size and girth as its TS8220 predecessor and the more robust Pixma TS9120.

Epson's competing photo-centric Expression Premium XP-7100 Small-in-One and HP's Envy Photo 7155 All-in-One are also similar in weight and size.

Consumer-grade photo-centric AIOs like these are meant for home-office use and therefore are designed to consume a minimal amount of desk space.

Configuration and walkup tasks, such as printing from SD cards or scanning to or printing from the cloud, are handled from the TS8320's control panel, which consists solely of a power button and a 4.3-inch touch-screen display, shown here.

The TS8320, like more and more consumer AIOs these days, supports voice-activation via Amazon's Alexa or Google's Assistant smart home appliances or through your smartphone from an app, as well as other platforms, such as Microsoft's Cortana or Apple's Siri, that support IFTTT (If This Then That) scripting technology.

In addition to the scripts that come with the TS8320, you can find and adapt additional ones from IFTTT.com and several other sites.

The TS8320's paper handling is comprised of 200 sheets split between a 100-sheet drawer up front and a 100-sheet tray that pulls out from the back.

The rear tray will also hold up to 20 sheets of letter-size (or smaller) photo paper.

There's also a tray that slides in just above the main paper tray for printing labels on appropriately surfaced optical discs.

This time around, though, the CD tray is billed as a "multipurpose" tray that supports several different types of media, including printable fingernail stickers, magnetic and re-stickable photo papers, as well as 3.5-by-3.5-inch and 5-by-5-inch square photo papers.

The TS8320 prints two-sided pages automatically, and the flatbed scanner scans and copies up to letter-size photos and documents.

Furthermore, the 30-page output tray extends as needed—so that your documents should never wind up on the floor.

Unfortunately, there's no automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning and copying multipage documents.

In fact, to get an ADF from a TS-series Pixma, you'll have to step all the way up to the wide-format TS9520.

As mentioned, Epson's XP-7100 comes with a 35-page ADF.

By comparison, the Pixma TS9120's paper capacity is also 200 sheets, while the XP-7100 holds up to 120 sheets, split between a 100-sheet main cassette and a 20-sheet photo paper insert inside of that.

Canon stopped publishing monthly duty cycle and recommended monthly volume ratings on its consumer-grade photo printers a few years back, though my educated guess is that the TS8320 should easily churn out a few hundred pages each month without breaking a sweat.

Connectivity and Software

Standard interfaces are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 LE (Low Energy), connecting to a single PC via USB 2.0, PictBridge Wireless for printing from compatible Canon cameras, and a memory card slot for printing from SD cards.

In addition to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, mobile device support consists of Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Mopria, or the Canon Print app.

You can also print from several flavors of SD cards via the slot located to the left of the output tray.

In addition to the standard AIO drivers that allow your PC or Mac to interact with the TS8320, the software bundle includes the following programs and utilities: Scan Utility (a fairly robust scanner interface); Scan Utility Lite (macOS only, a scaled-down iteration of Scan Utility); Easy PhotoPrint Editor Software (for editing and enhancing photos); My Printer (Windows only, for monitoring and making configuration changes to your printer) Network Tool (for monitoring and configuring your network to work more efficiently with your printer); Quick Menu (a set of shortcut icons that display by default in the lower-right corner of your screen and allow you quick access to most of the features listed here).

You can also get Easy PhotoPrint Editor as a mobile app that allows you to make corrections and enhancements to the photos you take with your mobile device without transferring them to your PC.

Also included in the bundle is Canon's Message In Print app, which allows you to embed hidden messages, such as animations, text, music, video links, and so on, directly inside the image.

Friends, family, or coworkers can download and install the app, and then simply hold their mobile devices' cameras over the image to reveal your custom-made messages, or to open the links contained within the photos.

Clocking the TS8320

Canon rates the TS8320 at 15 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 10ppm for color pages.

To confirm these speeds, I tested it over USB from our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.

During the first portion of my testing regimen, the TS8320 printed our standard 12-page Microsoft Word test document at the rate of 15ppm, matching its rating.

That score is about 1.5ppm faster than its TS9120 sibling and its TS8220 predecessor.

Epson's XP-7100 also printed the document at 15ppm, and HP's Envy 7155 managed 1ppm behind that.

See How We Test Printers

For the next test, I printed several colorful and complex Acrobat business documents, Excel spreadsheets and charts and graphs, and PowerPoint handouts containing business graphics and a variety of fonts at several different colors and sizes.

Then I combined those results with the score from the previous 12-page text document test and came up with a score of 5.1ppm, which was ever-so-slightly faster than both the TS8220 and the TS9120, 1.5ppm slower than the XP-7100 and 1.3ppm quicker than the HP 7155.

The TS8320 printed our pair of colorful and detailed 4-by-6-inch snapshots at an average of 29 seconds, which was close by a few seconds to most of the other models mentioned here, except that the HP 7155's 44 seconds was several seconds slower.

Between 30 and 60 seconds is about average for snapshot printing among these consumer-grade photo printers.

Pixma Imaging Excellence

Few consumer-grade photo AIOs print and copy as well as Canon's six-ink Pixmas, especially photos and graphics, and the TS8320 holds up this tradition.

It also prints well-shaped and highly legible text, and graphics come out with no noticeable banding or streaking.

Colors and gradients are brilliant and accurate.

But the TS8320 is a photo printer first, and it shows.

The test 4-by-6-inch and 8-by-10-inch borderless photographs I printed displayed vibrant colors and impressive detail, rivaled only by Canon's other five- and six-ink Pixmas and Epson's five- and six-ink Expression Premium AIOs, such as the XP-7100 mentioned earlier.

High Running Costs

Like most other consumer-grade photo printers, the TS8320 is expensive to use.

Depending on what you print, you'll pay somewhere between 4 to 6 cents for monochrome pages and 15 to 17 cents for color pages.

Photographs with 100 percent ink coverage can cost considerably more.

But this isn't exclusive to Pixmas.

Epson's similarly priced photo printers, including the XP-7100 mentioned earlier, cost about the same as the TS8320 to use.

HP's four-ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) printers, including the Envy 7155, are Instant Ink-capable machines.

If you enroll them in the company's Instant Ink subscription program, you can spend as little as 3.5 cents per page.

Six-ink Pixmas like the TS8320 cost significantly more to use than many comparable models, but few inkjets available print as well, making this a classic example of getting what you pay for.

When Quality Matters

If top-notch output is what you're looking for in a home office all-in-one, the Pixma TS8320 will serve you well.

While it's not cheap to use, it churns out exceptional documents and photos at a respectable clip.

If you often scan or copy multipage documents, you'll want to check out the Editors' Choice Epson Expression Premium XP-7100 Small-in-One, which comes with the auto-duplexing ADF that this Canon model lacks.

Otherwise, the TS8320 is an excellent option if you're willing to pay in the long run for quality output.