Canon PIXMA TS3520 Printer Review

The Canon PIXMA TS3520's build quality is sub-par. It's entirely plastic and feels flimsy, especially the rear input tray, output slider, and scanner's lid. You can access the ink cartridges and paper jams from the front panel, but there's very little space to maneuver, so people with large hands might have a bit more trouble. The scanner's lid stays open on its own, and its hinges can also extend a bit to accommodate slightly thicker media like magazines and textbooks. The power cable is removable, making it easy to replace if it gets damaged. It also plugs in horizontally rather than sticking out from the rear, which allows you to put the printer closer to the wall.

The first unit we bought gave cartridge installation and paper jam errors, even though we verified that everything was clear and properly installed. It also made loud grinding noises and would not print. We labeled it as defective and ordered a new one, which has been working as expected. If you have the same model and are experiencing similar issues, let us know in the discussions.

The Canon PIXMA TS3520 requires a fair amount of maintenance to keep the printer in working order. There are built-in functions to help you, like deep cleaning, print head alignment, roller cleaning, and bottom plate cleaning. You can access the sheet rollers and ink cartridges from the front panel, though the opening is quite small, making it hard for people with large hands to reach paper jams and the ink cartridges. You'll likely have to replace the ink cartridges often as they don't yield many prints before they run out, and the printer needs to be on when you change them. The input tray holds 60 sheets of paper, so you might have to refill it often if you print a lot. You can access the online user manuals here.

The Canon TS3520 has a tiny monochrome display. It has bad viewing angles and doesn't tilt or swivel, so you have to stand up and look down at the printer to see it properly. Also, it's hard to navigate the settings menu. There are only a few buttons and indicator lights for basic functions, including switching between wireless connectivity types, starting maintenance tasks, and copying in black or color.

The Canon PIXMA TS3520's ink cartridges yield very few black or color prints before they run out, meaning you'll need to replace them very often. Also, since there's only one color cartridge, you'll need to replace the entire cartridge even if you run out of just one color. On the bright side, there are high-yield versions of the cartridges that'll last longer.

The Canon TS3520 has a flatbed scanner only. Its lid's hinges can extend a little to scan thick items like a thin book or notebook. The scanner has a built-in OCR (optical character recognition) feature that lets you save your scans as searchable PDFs, JPEGs, or TXT files. Its character recognition isn't perfect as it does make mistakes, but it's mostly in math equations and subscript text. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an automatic document feeder, so scanning a multi-page document will take a long time, especially if the sheets are double-sided.

The Canon PIXMA TS3520's scan quality is mediocre. The scanned images have very high contrast and brighter colors than the original document. The scanner doesn't pick up a lot of fine details, like the SAMPLE watermark or the background lines on the graph, and colored areas look grainy and pixelated. You can get a better quality scan using the 'Photo' preset, but it'll also pick up the color and texture of the paper. The printer saves scans as PDFs by default, but you can change the output to JPEG. To do so, select the ScanGear option in the Canon IJ Scan Utility software, then choose 'Document (Color)' as the source. You can click 'Preview' to change the document's orientation before scanning.

• Getting Started guide
• 3x 4" x 6" Photo Paper Plus Glossy II sheets
• Power cord
• Starter ink cartridges:
• 1x PG-275 black
• 1x CL-276 color

The Canon PIXMA TS3520 prints black and white documents decently well. There's a significant amount of banding when printing in the 'Standard' quality mode as each printed section overlaps the previous one to avoid gaps. However, this isn't an issue when printing in the 'High Quality' mode because it prints each section slightly more faded with the new section overlapping half of the previous section, thus reducing the appearance of lines and defects. It struggles with bright or pale colors, like the yellow and orange colors in the title of the sample page, and there's also a lot of noise throughout, causing small details to appear fuzzy. If you need an inkjet printer that produces higher-quality black and white documents, check out the Epson Expression Home XP-5200.

The Canon PIXMA TS3520 prints color documents well. There are a lot of fine details; however, the whole print looks pale, and text isn't very crisp. There's some banding, but not enough to be distracting.

The Canon PIXMA TS3520's cost-per-print is very high due to the ink cartridges' low page yield. It's better for photo and color printing than for black-only, but it'll still add up quickly if you print a lot. There's an optional ink subscription plan called PIXMA Print Plan, which will deliver new ink cartridges to you when you run low. If you want a similar printer with a lower cost per print, check out the Canon PIXMA MG2522.

The Canon TS3520 prints slowly, whether it's a black-only or color document. However, it's not too bad with photos and doesn't take too long to wake up from sleep and get a single page out. It can't print double-sided automatically, so to print on both sides, you have to wait until it finishes printing on one side of all your sheets, then flip over the stack and reinsert it as instructed to print the second side.

The Canon PIXMA TS3520 only has a rear input tray, which Canon specifies can hold up to either 60 plain sheets or 20 sheets of glossy 4" x 6" paper.

The printer doesn't accept glossy paper larger than 5" x 7", so you can't print on 8" x 10" photo paper. That said, you can still print this size on regular copy paper, so we listed the test result as 'Yes'.

The Canon PIXMA TS3520 has an okay color gamut. The zigzag line is only partially visible in the blues and reds. The black area at the bottom doesn't extend far enough, while the white area extends too far, especially in the purple region. It means that the printer has trouble reproducing dark and saturated colors. Although it isn't noticeable in the photo, the transition between colors isn't very smooth.

The Canon PIXMA TS3520 is okay at reproducing colors. While blues, blacks, and browns are the most inaccurate, they still look good enough for casual use.

The Canon TS3520 is compatible with the Canon PRINT Inkjet/SELPHY app, which lets you print most file types and scan and copy on the flatbed from your phone. You can also order ink and view scanned sheets directly from your device. Unfortunately, you can't print TXT files or HTML files from either version of the app.

The Canon PIXMA TS3520 is fully compatible with Windows, Chrome OS, and macOS. You need to manually install drivers on Windows devices to have full functionality, but you don't have to on Chrome OS or macOS.