How long does the Canon G6020 ink last?

Updated June 18, 2026

Years, not months — the G6020 is a refillable MegaTank, so its supply dwarfs any cartridge printer. Canon rates it to Print up to 6,000 black & white / 7,700 color pages using a single set of inks! (1). For a home printing most weeks, the bottles outlast the printer. The real limit is not running the tanks dry — it is the idle-clog tax when the machine sits unused.

The honest answer starts with a number most cartridge owners struggle to believe. According to Canon's own MegaTank G6020 page-yield specification, a single set of bottle ink covers thousands of pages, and the in-box black supply is large enough that one owner described it as The printer also comes with what must be an almost a lifetime's supply of black ink. That is the whole reason the MegaTank exists: front-load the ink so the cartridge shelf stops being a monthly tax. We break the cartridge-versus-tank yield math down across the catalog in our type-versus-type tradeoffs analysis.

So the box supply is measured in years. The question becomes what years means for you.

Translate the rating into real life and one variable does all the work: how many pages you print a week. That in-box figure is a ceiling, not a promise — print 20 pages a week and the fill stretches across several years; print 150-200 a week running a homeschool or a side business and it lands closer to a 1-2 year window. The supply held up for the longest-haul owners in our review data, one of whom reported the machine still printing fine after two years of frequent use. The yield is real; how fast you reach it is yours to set.

PIXMA G6020

Refillable tanks

There is a catch that caps real-world ink life, and it has nothing to do with the tank size. A bottle-ink tank rewards a steady habit and punishes idle weeks: leave the heads dry and the recovery is an automatic cleaning cycle that spends ink to clear them, so the supply you bought to last years can quietly drain on maintenance. The reliability tail is real too — even on a high-yield tank, one owner hit a dead channel, noting One small problem was that the black ink quit printing three days ago. That is the exception, not the rule; another owner's UPDATE TWO YEARS LATER:Continues to work flawlessly. We track that idle-clog and reliability behaviour model by model in our cost and reliability criteria.

How long does the Canon Pixma MG3620 ink last?

Far shorter — and that is the point of the contrast. The MG3620 is a cartridge printer, not a tank, and Canon ships a starter cartridge smaller than the replacements you buy. Measured in cartridge sets rather than years, its ink runs out fast for any real volume, and refills add up. A G6020 buys years of bottle ink where the MG3620 buys weeks of a small cartridge.

Honestly, the gap between a cartridge PIXMA and the G6020 MegaTank is the whole reason this question matters.

The MG3620 measures ink life the old way: by the cartridge, and the math is stacked against the owner from the box. One MG3620 owner caught the trap directly — And Canon gives you a smaller cartridge in the printer, than they sell for replacements. Even a glowing long-form review concedes the structural cost: The Pixma uses ink cartridges, which can get pricey. Its 100 sheet capacity is a fraction of the G6020's tray, too, so it refills paper sooner as well as ink. For a few pages a year the MG3620 is fine; print regularly and its ink life is a recurring bill the G6020 turns into a one-time fill.

How long does the Canon PIXMA TS7720 ink last?

For a light household, the TS7720 cartridges last a reasonable stretch and the running cost stays sane. But it is still a two-cartridge machine, so ink life is capped by cartridge size, and owners cross-shopping it for volume are steered to a tank because the refills get expensive. Print weekly or more and a G6020 outlasts it many times over on a single in-box fill.

The TS7720 is the better-behaved cartridge model, and its owners say so: The ink cartridges last and the cost is reasonable for household printing needs. For a light printer that is a genuine answer — the ink lasts long enough that the cost-per-page never stings. But the ceiling is still cartridge-sized, and the community knows where the line crosses: a TS7720 cross-shopper printing more is pushed toward the MegaTank precisely because the refills for the first two are so expensive. So the TS7720's ink lasts well for low volume and the G6020's lasts well for high volume — the deciding number is how much you print, the cost fork we map across the range in our type-versus-type tradeoffs analysis.

How long does the ink last in the HP Smart Tank 6001?

About as long as the G6020 — it is the same bottle-tank class. HP rates the 6001 for up to 2 years of ink and up to 8,000 color or 6,000 black pages from the box, and one sibling-line owner has printed over 7,000 pages on the original ink. Like the Canon, the cap is idle clogging and printhead wear, not running the tanks empty.

Same shelf, same job, same answer.

Cross-shoppers ask this because the G6020 and the HP 6001 sit on the same shelf doing the same job. HP rates its tank to 2 years of Original HP Ink included; get up to 8,000 color pages or 6,000 black pages right out of the box — a comparable years-long supply, color yield even higher than the Canon. The real-world proof tracks the spec: one HP tank-line owner notes they have Probably have printed over 7,000 pages at this point and it's still running amazingly well. The honest caveat is the same for both brands — owners on HP's line warn that printhead replacement can erode the bottle savings, the same idle-and-maintenance trap that caps a Canon tank. On ink life they are a wash; the choice comes down to reliability record and which app you would rather avoid.

TS7720 (cartridge)

HP 6001 (bottle tank)

Are Canon MegaTank printers any good?

For ink life, the MegaTank is the smart PIXMA: bottle refills rated in the thousands of pages, the lowest cost-per-page Canon sells, and the G6020 adds duplex and a 350-sheet tray. The catch is one rule, not a flaw in the yield. Print on a steady habit or the idle printhead clogs, and a cleaning cycle spends the ink you bought it to save. Reliability runs unit by unit.

On the metric this page cares about, the MegaTank line is the strongest thing Canon sells. The supply is huge, the refills are cheap, and the G6020 layers on real convenience the budget models skip — it carries Auto 2-Sided printing and a tray big enough that the The 350-sheet paper capacity meant less time refilling paper. The reliability split is unit-level, the kind of pattern Consumer Reports tracks across inkjet reliability and owner satisfaction rather than a brand-wide verdict — most units run for years, a tail die early. None of that changes the ink-life answer. The full G6020-class verdict, idle-clog rule and all, sits in our Canon MegaTank G3290 review.

So the answer is years for most homes — with one condition attached.

Add it up and the ink-life question has a clean shape. Canon rates the G6020 for up to 6,000 black or 7,700 color pages, the in-box black supply runs close to a lifetime for a light home, and the longest-haul owners back the claim. The cartridge PIXMAs measure ink life in small sets; the HP Smart Tank 6001 matches the G6020 year for year; and across all of them the one cap is the idle-clog tax, not the tank. The standard for what cheap bottle ink should cost per page is set by independent testing — RTINGS lab-tests printer cost-per-print and risk-of-clogging across 182 models and puts bottle ink many times cheaper per page than cartridges, the gap a MegaTank exists to close. Print on a steady habit and the G6020's ink really does last years; leave it idle and the supply drains on cleaning cycles instead of pages.