Canon Pixma MG4220 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-in-One

By M. David Stone

inkjet MFPs, which is usually synonymous with being a home-oriented printer, the Canon Pixma MG4220 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-in-One is just as suitable for a home office, in a distinctly low-end kind of way. It doesn't offer any office-centric features like a fax capability or an automatic document feeder (ADF), but given its better-than-average text quality, it's a good choice for light-duty home office printing. In addition, its Wi-Fi capability makes it easy to share, which in turn makes it a potentially good fit in the dual role of home and home office printer.

The MG4220 has a lot in common with the lower-priced Editors' Choice Kodak ESP 3.2 All-in-One Printer that I reviewed earlier this year. Both can print, scan, and copy, and both can print JPG files directly from memory cards. In both cases, you can also preview the images on memory cards before printing, with a 2.5-inch color display in the case of the MG4220.

One limitation for the printer is its paper handling. The low paper capacity, with a 100-sheet input tray, is enough for only light-duty use, even in a home office. On the other hand, the MG4220 also includes a duplexer (for two-sided printing), a welcome extra that doesn't show up on many inexpensive printers aimed at home users.

Setup and Speed 

For my tests, I connected the MG4220 by USB cable to a system running Windows Vista. Setup was standard fare, with one annoying exception. Most inkjets include a printhead alignment step, either as an automatic step in the installation program, or with instructions in a Quick Start guide. The MG4220 simply shows a message suggesting that you align the printheads and saying that the instructions are in the User Guide.

Less sophisticated users are likely to be frustrated by this. More knowledgeable users are likely to skip the User Guide and go directly to the driver menus, where they'll find a manual alignment procedure. However, there's also a much simpler, semi-automated procedure hidden in the printer's control panel menus. Installation would be a lot easier for both groups if the Quick Start guide or onscreen message gave the steps for the second choice.

Once installed, the printer works as promised. Speed, however, is not a strong point. I timed the printer (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at an effective speed of just 2.1 pages per minute (ppm) on our business applications suite. That translates to being far slower than the similarly priced home-oriented HP Photosmart 5520 e-All-in-One , at 3.7 ppm, and slower even than the less expensive Kodak ESP 3.2, at 3.2 ppm.

Photo speed was also unimpressive, with an average 2 minutes 7 seconds for a 4-by-6 print on our tests. That makes the MG4220 far slower than either the HP printer, at 1:03, or the Kodak printer, at 50 seconds.

Quality, and Other Issues

The good news for the MG4220 is that its output quality largely makes up for any deficiencies in speed, thanks largely to above-par text. The text doesn't offer the kind of crisp clean edges I'd want for, say, a resume, but it can match many lasers for overall readability at a variety of fonts and font sizes. It's certainly good enough for any business use. The one potential issue is that it smudges if it gets wet.

Graphics quality is at the high end of the tight range where most inkjets fall. It's easily good enough for any internal business use, including PowerPoint handouts. Depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, you may consider it suitable for output that’s going to an important client or customer. Somewhat oddly for a printer that's supposed to be aimed at home use, the photo quality is less impressive than either graphics or text quality. It falls at the low end of par for an inkjet, or roughly the low end of what you would expect if you went to a local drugstore for prints.

One last feature worth mention is support for mobile printing, including AirPrint and Google Cloud Print. To use any of the mobile printing features, however, you have to connect the printer to a network, which means using Wi-Fi, since the printer doesn't offer Ethernet.

The saving grace for this printer, and what makes it worth considering, is the overall above-par output, with particular emphasis on text quality. The HP 5520 offers much better speed at the same price, and the Kodak ESP 3.2 offers somewhat better speed and most of the same features at a lower price. But for a home office where text quality is a key consideration, the Canon Pixma MG4220 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-in-One can easily be the best fit.

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D-Link Wireless AC1200 Dual Band USB Adapter (DWA-182)

By Samara Lynn

D-Link has the distinction of being the first networking hardware vendor with a pre-draft 802.11ac wireless adapter on the market. The Wireless AC1200 Dual Band USB Adapter (DWA-182) ($79.00, street) can connect notebooks and laptops to pre-draft 802.11ac routers and can do so through push-button WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup).However, during testing, I was unable to connect via WPS to a draft 802.11ac router other than D-Link's. Even when connected to D-Link's own 802.11ac router, the D-Link Amplifi Cloud Router 5700 (DIR-856L) , throughput reached nowhere near the touted speeds of up to 857 Mbps on the 5GHz band—and only slighted boosted performance over that of an 802.11n adapter.

Of course, I don't expect any router to come close to theoretical speeds in real-world environments. However, because the DWA-182 is 802.11ac-capable, when it's paired with an 802.11ac router, I so expect that throughput should be faster than with an 802.11n adapter. Since network speed is only as fast as your slowest link, I expected an 802.11ac adapter tested with an 802.11ac router to provide faster throughput than testing the same 802.11ac router with an 802.11n adapter. Remember, 802.11 only provides theoretical throughout of up to 450 Mbps on the 5GHz band. 

 The DWA-182 supports both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. It's also backward compatible, so you can use it with just about any wireless router—so long as you aren't trying to use WPS.

The adapter is rather wide, measuring 3.8 by 1.1 by 0.5 inches (LWH). If a notebook has stacked USB ports, the DWA-182, when connected to the uppermost port, will likely block the bottom one.

WPA and WPA2 as well as 128-bit WEP, and of course WPS, are all supported. The WPS button and a tiny, blue LED are located on the top of the adapter.

Setup

The adapter is so new that my Windows 7 laptop was unable to install or recognize drivers for it upon connection.  This isn't a problem since D-Link ships a CD with the DWA-182. The CD contains not only the driver, install guide, and user manual, but also free trials of Norton Internet Security 2012 and Norton Online Backup.

The CD kicks off an installation wizard. During install, the wizard prompts to either manually type in the SSID and password to the network you want to connect to, or to use WPS.

I opted to install via WPS. The wizard instructs to click the WPS button on the router and then click the "Connect Now" button on-screen. I first tried connecting to a Linksys draft 802.11ac router but the WPS connection failed. I had no problems connecting to D-Link's AC router, the DIR-865L via WPS.

Now of course, I could manually connect to the Linksys 802.11ac router. However, WPS is a standard and is not supposed to be a proprietary technology; that would defeat the purpose of easy push-button setup of wireless devices. Hopefully, the failure of the DWA-182 to not connect to the Linksys router can be attributed to some wonkiness due to this being pre-draft 802.11ac technology and vendor incompatibility issues won't be a problem when products come to market that are fully 802.11ac  certified.

 During install, you can also opt to scan for wireless networks in proximity and connect to them if you don't know the name of the SSID. It's an easy setup but WPS should work for any WPS-capable router.

Wireless Utility

The installation process also includes the install of D-Link's Wireless Connection Manager. I typically don’t like third-party wireless managers sitting on top of the Windows native wireless management because the utility usually makes adjusting any settings through Windows Network and Sharing interface useless.  D-Link's utility did not prevent me from using Windows wireless networking settings, though.

 The utility displays all wireless networks in proximity. You can connect to a network through the manager and it shows signal strength, the channel the network is on and whether the network is secured or not. I like the fact that it shows percentage of signal strength and the channel the wireless network is operating on, information that Windows does not show natively.

Networks you connect to most frequently are listed in the utility under My Wireless Networks, and there's a quick link to D-Link support. The utility is not necessary to use, but it does provide a bit more insight into a wireless networks than the operating system alone.

Performance

I was disappointed with performance. I did not see anywhere near the speeds vendors are claiming about 802.11ac, and just a sight bump in performance in 5 GHz 802.11ac mode. Below is a table comparing throughput testing D-Link's DIR-865L router using a standard 802.11n 3xe3 wireless adapter versus the DWA-182 in Mixed 11ac mode:

802.11n testing was performed with an HP Elitebook with an integrated Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN wirelessly connected to the DIR-865L; a Windows server machine with a Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet card connected to a LAN port on the DIR-865L and Ixia's IxChariot throughput script.

11ac testing was performed with the same equipment and script but for the exception: the Intel Centrino wireless adapter was disabled on the Elitebook and the DWA-182 adapter installed.

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Samsung Wireless Audio Dock (DA-E750)

By Tim Gideon, Will Greenwald

Few speaker systems have illicited as many "oohs" and "aahs" as the has. To be fair, there's a lot to like: dual dock connectors for Samsung and Apple devices; wireless audio streaming via Bluetooth, AirPlay, or AllShare; and two nifty-looking vacuum tubes that emit a soft orange glow beneath a glass cover on the top panel. But now come the "ughs": It'll cost you $699.99 (list), can be pesky to set up, and suffers from occasional distortion at top volumes. At moderate volumes, however, the DA-E750 offers solid audio performance—and did we mention that it's beautiful?

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