When did the Canon G3270 come out?

Updated June 18, 2026

Canon names no tidy launch date, so the honest answer is placement, not a day. The G3270 belongs to the current four-digit MegaTank generation, it is still sold new rather than retired, and the G3290 is its newer sibling. For a buyer, the useful question is which of the two fits your printing, not the year the model shipped.

Here is the honest shape of it. Canon does not stamp a public launch date on a model the way a phone maker does, and it does not publish a retirement notice either — so the cleanest read is the current line-up itself. Canon's current MegaTank printer range still lists the four-digit G-series the G3270 belongs to, which tells a buyer the one thing a date cannot: this is a current model on sale now, not a clearance relic. So the practical truth is placement — recent generation, still stocked — and the decision that follows is cost-of-ownership, not the year on a spec sheet.

G3270 — current entry

G3290 — newer sibling

What keeps the G3270 worth buying has nothing to do with its age, which is exactly why the date is the wrong question. Canon rates it to Print up to 6,000 black & white / 7,700 color pages using a single set of inks and ships it with Up to 2 years of ink included — bottle economics, not the cartridge tax. Speed is modest but fine for a home: according to an independent reviewer, It prints about 11 pages per minute in black and 6 in color. Those numbers describe a current cost pick, and they are the reason buyers still cross-shop it model-for-model rather than chasing a launch year.

The date is trivia; the cost case is the real question.

The cost-of-ownership verdict, then, is blunt: judge the G3270 by what it costs to own, not by when it arrived. A bottle-fed supertank earns its keep on running cost over months, the logic that RTINGS independent printer testing scores when it weighs cost-per-print across the field. The one live cross-shop that actually changes a buyer's mind is the newer G3290, which we line up head to head in our Canon G3270 vs G3290 comparison, and place in the wider field in our best supertank printers roundup.

Is the Canon G3270 a good printer?

For a household that prints weekly, yes — bottle ink quotes thousands of pages a fill, so the cartridge tax disappears, and owners call the everyday quality good after a short break-in. The honest catches are no auto-duplex, a tiny status screen, weak colour on glossy stock, and the idle-clog rule every tank carries. Print rarely and it is the wrong buy.

Honestly, none of that hinges on the year it shipped.

Take the praise and the pushback together, because both are fair. On the upside, the everyday output lands once it settles: one owner reported being happy with the quality After using it a week or so of normal home printing. The catch a craft buyer needs to hear is the ink chemistry — the G3270 uses pigment-based black with dye-based CMY. Pigment-based ink doesn't adhere to some glossy media, so it is a document machine first, not a photo printer. That is a current-model verdict, not a dated one. The full case, with the model that fixes the duplex gap, sits in our Canon MegaTank G3290 review.

What is the difference between Canon G3290 and G3270?

Same bottle-ink engine, same page yield, same cost-per-page — so running cost is identical. The G3290 adds the two things the G3270 drops: automatic two-sided printing and a colour touchscreen instead of a tiny one-line panel. It is a features-and-panel step-up, not a cheaper page. Pay up only if duplex or the bigger screen matters to you.

Honestly, this is the cross-shop that should replace the date question entirely. The two share the ink economics that sell them, so the gap is hardware. The G3270 is Single-sided printing with a bare 1.35” Square LCD display; the newer G3290 answers both with Auto 2-sided printing and a 2.7” LCD Color Touchscreen. Owners back the newer unit too — We've got a Canon G3290 and mostly love it - the print quality is excellent. So the decision is duplex-and-screen versus a lower price, not old versus new. We map it fully in our Canon G3270 vs G3290 comparison.

G3270 — bottle fill

G3290 — bottle fill

Are Canon MegaTank printers any good?

For weekly printing the MegaTank line is Canon's cost pick — bottle ink quotes thousands of pages a fill against the 180-400 a small cartridge drains, so the cartridge tax goes away. The single condition is use: leave one idle and the printhead clogs, and a cleaning cycle spends the ink you bought it to save. The line is alive and current, from the entry G3270 to fax-equipped siblings.

There is a real condition attached to the savings, and it catches idle owners out. The cost case is hard to beat across the line — the same bottle system that quotes thousands of pages a fill — and the family is plainly still active: one owner runs a Canon, G4570 (It's a G3270 with fax and sheet scanner) alongside the entry models, current siblings of the same generation. The trap is leaving any of them dark. The remedy is a habit, not a different machine: run a colour page about once a week. Consumer Reports, which tracks inkjet reliability and owner satisfaction, flags this idle-clog pattern as the supertank's defining caveat. We rank the bottle-fed options in our best supertank printers roundup.

What are the disadvantages of MegaTank?

Three weigh on a MegaTank buyer. The clog risk if it sits idle, which a weekly colour page fixes for free. The higher up-front price than a cartridge machine, which only pays back at volume. And on the entry G3270 specifically, no auto-duplex and a four-ink set tuned for documents, not gallery photos. None of these sink the cost case for a steady-printing home.

So the disadvantages are real, but they are conditions of ownership, not deal-breakers. The clog is the loud one — a tank punishes idle weeks, and the fix is the free weekly page above. The up-front premium is the second: a MegaTank costs more than a cheap cartridge printer on day one and only banks its savings if you actually print, which is why a light printer is better off elsewhere. The third is model-specific and the exact reason the cross-shop matters — the G3270's lack of duplex is precisely what the newer G3290 fixes. The full range, current siblings included, sits in our guide to Canon inkjet printers.

Compact body

Control panel

Add it up and the timing question resolves into a buying instruction. There is no public launch date to recite, but there does not need to be: the G3270 is a current four-digit MegaTank, still on sale, with the cost case its whole reason to exist. Nothing about its age should sway the decision. So stop hunting a release year and run the real cross-shop instead — weigh the cheaper G3270 against the duplex-and-touchscreen G3290, print regularly to keep the heads wet, and let the bottle ink pay the machine back. That one distinction — entry model versus the step-up sibling — settles the whole question.