Canon PIXMA TS6520 Review: Cheap to Buy, Watch the Cartridges

Updated June 18, 2026

Functions Print, scan, copy, auto-duplex

Connectivity Dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4/5 GHz), AirPrint, Mopria

Our Verdict

The best-rated budget all-in-one we cover: dual-band Wi-Fi, automatic duplex, and an easy setup at a low sticker. But it is a two-cartridge machine, so match it to a low-to-moderate print rate or a refillable tank will cost far less to feed.

Best for: Low-to-moderate-volume homes wanting a no-drama all-in-one

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Overview

The calm budget all-in-one

The TS6520 is the printer you buy when the last one drove you up the wall. Canon pitches it plainly — A budget-friendly all-in-one for home users and hybrid workers — and at that job it earns the highest owner rating of any budget machine on this site: 4.4 stars across 9 reviews. Most of that goodwill is about the path to the first page, not the page itself.

That's the lens this site puts on every machine — the cartridge-versus-tank math of what a printer actually costs to own over months, not what it costs on the shelf. And here the lens matters, because the TS6520 is a two-cartridge printer. The sticker is low. The ink is where Canon earns it back.

The owner record is unusually warm, and it opens with relief. People come to it worn out by another brand:

We've been struggling and struggling with our (different name brand) printer, and finally decided to just move on. What they moved to, in this case, is a machine they call easy from the first run. Same category as the printer they fled — the difference is how little fuss it asks.

What the spec sheet says

The spec sheet is where the TS6520 quietly out-equips its price. Connectivity comes first: Canon's box copy promises Reliable Wireless Connectivity over dual-band Wi-Fi — 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz. That second band is the part that matters, because cheaper budget all-in-ones are often 2.4 GHz only and stall on a modern mesh router. It prints from a phone too, over the Canon PRINT App, Apple AirPrint, and Mopria Print Service.

Then comes the feature the price class usually drops. Canon's listing leads with Save Time & Paper through automatic two-sided printing — true auto-duplex, no flipping pages by hand. On a long document that halves paper use. We grade the spec lines that actually separate machines in our comparison criteria for inkjet printers.

It's a full color all-in-one, not a print-only box: a flatbed scanner and copier are on board, and it handles documents and photos up to 8.5” x 11”, with or without borders. The one corner Canon cut is the screen. Status and ink levels show on a small 1.42” Monochrome OLED screen — a readout, not a color touchscreen — and at this price that's a fair trade.

Performance & Real-World Testing

Setup is the headline, and it's good

Here's the thing: the most consistent praise in the review set isn't the print quality — it's the setup. One owner sums up the camp plainly: Easy to set up, simple to use, intuitive. That word — intuitive — is exactly what cheaper rivals fumble, where the software fights you before the first page lands. Coming from a printer they had given up on, owners volunteer the calm first run before anything else.

Several didn't expect it to be this easy.

The wireless holds up in real homes, not just the spec sheet. Another owner reports flatly that Remote printing and Wi-Fi work great. That is the dual-band radio doing its job — printing from across the house and from a phone without the network drama that fills one-star reviews across the category.

Where it trips: the account, not the printer

The single sharpest gotcha has nothing to do with hardware. The printer sets up fast; the Canon online account does not. As one owner put it, Setting up a Canon account at their website actually took longer than setting up the printer itself. You can print without lingering on it, but budget a few extra minutes for the website, not the machine.

The other trip is the router, and it's usually fixable. Some Canon PIXMA owners hit network setup pain, but the community answer is rarely "return it" — it's a settings tweak: Most people with this issue solved it by going into their WiFi router's configuration, and set up a DHCP reservation. A reserved IP keeps the printer at one address so the app stops losing it. Connectivity reliability, not resolution, is what separates a kept budget printer from a returned one — the pattern we track across the whole owner record in our inkjet printers evidence hub, and in our safety and known-risks guidance.

Print quality is where it should be for the class — good for documents, fair for photos. One owner adds the honest caveat: Caveat - the color isn't wonderful on the super-cheap paper they were using. That's a paper problem as much as a printer one; color output on coated stock looks far better than on bargain copier paper.

Value Analysis

Cheap to buy, watch the cartridges

Here's where the cheap printer gets expensive. The TS6520 is a two-cartridge machine, and cartridge machines make their money after you've bought them. The community says it in one line: the cheaper the printer the more expensive the ink cartridges. The sticker is the bait; the ink is the bill.

The printer is the cheap part. The cartridges are the subscription nobody told you about.

Independent testing backs that gap. RTINGS' independent cost-per-print and page-yield testing puts cartridge cost-per-page many times higher than bottle ink, and Consumer Reports' inkjet running-cost and reliability testing reaches the same verdict. A cartridge model is cheaper to buy and dearer to feed; a refillable tank is the reverse. The month the two lines cross is the month the cheap printer stops being cheap.

How fast that crossover arrives is the whole decision, and it splits cleanly by volume. The Reddit threads cross-shopping this exact printer against a tank are blunt about it: You'd save an incredible amount of money if you go for a tank. The caveat in the same thread is the one that decides it — "if you print at least once a week." Below that, the cartridge machine wins. The meter below stages a cartridge's modest page yield against the refill cadence owners report.

The volume test decides it

So the value verdict splits by how much you print. Print rarely and the TS6520 is honestly cheap to own — and it does it with duplex and 5 GHz Wi-Fi most budget rivals skip. Print every day and it quietly becomes the expensive machine, the checkout savings gone by the third cartridge set. We run that cartridge-versus-tank fork across the whole catalog in our type-versus-type tradeoffs analysis.

What to Expect Over Time

Living with it: ink path and idle time

Two things shape life with the TS6520 past the first week: the ink it takes, and how often it sits idle.

The ink, because the two-cartridge hybrid is the long-term cost. Canon builds it as a 2-cartridge hybrid ink system — one black, one color — which keeps the printer simple and the refills frequent. Cross-shoppers landing on a tank instead say it directly: the megatank is a more reasonable choice because the refills for the first two are so expensive. That's the trade in one sentence. The cheap machine asks for cartridges; the dear machine asks for bottles, far less often.

Idleness, because every inkjet has one failure mode a laser doesn't: liquid ink dries in the nozzles when the printer sits unused, and the machine spends ink on automatic cleaning cycles to clear it. A budget all-in-one bought for the occasional school run is, by definition, idle most of the month. Print something in color about once a week and it rarely bites; let it sit dark over the course of several weeks and the clog you meet is the evening you need a boarding pass.

The scan-and-copy side is the quiet long-term win, and one owner learned it the hard way on a previous machine: We also didn't realize when we bought our old printer that it didn't copy or scan, which proved to be a big issue. The TS6520 does both out of the box — the kind of all-in-one capability that stops a second device from landing on the desk a year later.