Canon MegaTank G3290 Review: A Budget Supertank on a Thin Record

Updated June 18, 2026

Functions Print, Scan, Copy

Connectivity Wi-Fi, AirPrint, Canon PRINT app

Ink System Cartridge-free refillable tanks

Our Verdict

Canon’s sub-premium answer to the EcoTank — bottle-fed running costs without the supertank-premium entry price. Owners who print every day call it a quiet workhorse, but the record is thin and positive-skewed, so treat the verdict as promising rather than proven.

Best for: Households that print most days and want refillable-tank running costs without paying supertank-premium prices

Color Name

BlackWhite

Style Name

Canon G3270 Printer (BK) - Backlit LCD ScreenCanon G3270 Printer (WH)- Backlit LCD ScreenCanon G3290 Printer - Touch LCD Screen

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Overview

The cartridge tax, run in reverse

Most supertanks ask you to pay up front for the savings: a high sticker now, cheap ink forever. The G3290's pitch is that you skip the premium part. Canon's listing leads with the running-cost math the cartridge brands bury — tanks rated to Print up to 6,000 black & white and 7,700 colour pages per fill, with hundreds of dollars in claimed lifetime ink savings. It even ships with Up to 2 years of ink included.

That is the whole reason this site exists: not the sticker, but the cartridge-versus-tank math of what a printer actually costs to own over time. The G3290 sits at pole two — bottle-fed, cheap to feed — at a price that usually buys a cartridge machine.

On paper, it's the cheap-printer trap sprung backwards.

The owner record is where the pitch meets reality, and it is thin. Across the 13 reviews, the verdict is positive but lopsided — and one r/printers owner sums up the happy camp plainly:

We've got a Canon G3290 and mostly love it - the print quality is excellent. Their one real gripe was connectivity, not output. That split — great hardware, fussy path to it — runs through the whole record.

What the spec sheet actually buys

The G3290 is a true all-in-one — Wireless Print/Copy/Scan over Wi-Fi, AirPrint, or the Canon PRINT app. The headline is the ink system: refillable bottle tanks instead of cartridges, the single fact that decides its long-term cost. Reviewers back the capacity claim — one printed at least 70 4x6 and 8x10 pictures plus dozens of pages before a refill.

The on-device kit punches above its price. It has Auto 2-sided printing and a 2.7” LCD Color Touchscreen — both rare on a machine this cheap, and both things the budget cartridge all-in-ones skip. Refills are quick, too: on the near-identical sibling tank, owners say the bottles take roughly 25-30 seconds to empty with no squeezing. We weigh exactly this kind of feature against running cost in our inkjet comparison criteria.

Two niggles catch people out. There's no print-from-USB-stick option: If you mean about printing with USB stick, then yea, it does not have that. The USB Type-B port wires it to a computer, not a flash drive, and sharing it across machines leans on Wi-Fi — WiFi is the only way to share this printer between two computers. The other gripe is the tanks you're meant to monitor: on the sibling model, The ink windows are NOT clear so have to check with a flashlight to see level.

Performance & Real-World Testing

When it prints, owners are happy

Print quality is the calm part of this record. The daily-driver camp is the loudest — one owner who prints every day reported, over the course of several months, no issues at all, and the rating reflects it: a 4.2-star average across 13 verified Amazon reviews. Canon's own MegaTank line pages lean on that high-volume, low-cost story, and for steady printers it largely holds.

Colour holds up under real load, too. One owner ran it non-stop for three days printing colour pictures for a happy-mail subscription business, and the surprise was how good the output looked despite the low price — a budget tank punching above what its sticker promises. Third-party aggregation is steady rather than glowing: Canon MegaTank PIXMA G3290 All-In-One Printer - White — 56 reviews, rated 4.1/5.

Where it goes wrong: setup and true black

The skip case lives in two places, and the first is setup. It can fail outright — one buyer found The setup page just kept spooling glitching and resetting so there was no way to connect. The gotcha owners learn the hard way is that there's little hand-holding in the box: on the sibling tank, There is no quick setup guide included in the box so you have to go online to get started. That's not a one-off grumble about a slow wizard; it's a printer that can refuse to onboard, on a thin enough record that one bad streak moves the average.

The second is true black. A subset of owners report a real fight to get a clean dark print — one logged Which leads to HOURS to try to get a decent true black print. On a document machine, hours spent chasing black text is the opposite of why you buy a supertank. Reliability can wobble early, too: one owner found their unit was This new one is like 2 weeks old and is already not working right. Neither problem is universal, but both are specific, and on 13 reviews they carry weight.

Value Analysis

Cheap to feed, cheap to buy — for once

Here's the thing a supertank usually asks you to swallow: a high entry price you have to trust will pay itself back. The G3290 mostly skips that bargain. It's bottle-fed like the dear machines but priced near the cartridge ones, and it lands with up to two years of ink already in the box.

The per-page math starts in your favour on day one.

Independent testing is clear on why that matters. RTINGS' cost-per-print and page-yield testing puts cartridge ink at several times the per-page cost of bottle ink, and Consumer Reports' inkjet running-cost testing reaches the same verdict. A cartridge model is cheaper to buy and dearer to feed; a tank is the reverse. The G3290's trick is being cheap on both ends at the same time. We run that fork across the whole catalog in our type-versus-type tradeoffs analysis.

The volume test

So the value verdict splits on one number: how much you print. Print most days and the G3290 is honestly excellent value — tank economics at a budget sticker. Print a couple of pages a day and the calculus shifts, and one r/printers owner is blunt about it: not worth putting up with a rubbish m-tank when your ink costs would be minimal anyway at that volume. A cheap cartridge printer is the easier life for very light use. We grade every machine against that running-cost case in our inkjet printers evidence hub.

What to Expect Over Time

Living with it: idle time and the long-haul record

Two things shape life with the G3290 past the first week: idleness, and what the longer-term owner record actually shows.

Idleness first, because the tank line has one failure mode a laser doesn't. Leave it unused and the ink can thicken or air-lock in the lines. One owner of the sibling tank model describes the worst case: the yellow ink was getting low air can get locked in the print tube and no amount of cleaning fixed it. There's a self-inflicted version, too — They don't always cap the nozzles if they're turned off from an external switch rather than via the power button, which dries the nozzles out. The fix is mundane: power it down properly, and print something in colour weekly. For anyone whose printer sits dark for long stretches, the community advice is blunter still — Return it for a color laser printer. Laser printers are much less fussy over idle weeks. We track that idle-clog risk in our safety and known-risks guidance.

The long-haul record is more reassuring than the G3290's own thin review count suggests, because the MegaTank platform has years behind it. Owners of the close siblings report the durability the G3290 hasn't had time to prove: one runs a Canon, G4570 (It's a G3270 with fax and sheet scanner) for 2 years with several people in the household using it and no problems. Another reports a Canon G3520 that ran 5 years and over 6,000 pages with no mechanical issues. The hardware lineage is durable; the G3290's uncertainty is its own short paper trail, not the family's.