• The Canon Maxify MB2120 Wireless Home Office Inkjet Printer is an all-in-one that prints well and fast, but it’s limited to a single paper drawer.

The Canon Maxify MB2120 Wireless Home Office Inkjet Printer ($179.99) is a one-drawer version of the Editors’ Choice Maxify MB2720 Wireless Home Office Inkjet Printer we reviewed a few months ago. In both performance and output quality, the MB2120, the MB2720, and the Canon Maxify MB5420 reviewed here recently, behaved much the same—fast enough for use as an entry-level home or home-based office all-in-one printer, with above-average print, scan, and copy quality. The MB2120’s paper capacity, only half that of those two printers, ensures that the MB5420 remains our Editors’ Choice. The Canon Maxify MB5120 is best as a low-cost alternative meant for lighter-duty use.

• Design and Features

Design-wise, the MB2120 has much the same look as other Maxify printers. It comes with a 250-sheet paper cassette, and no multipurpose, or override, tray, while the MB2720 comes with two 250-sheet cassettes. The MB2120 provides only half the input capacity of the MB5420 as well.

At 10.3 by 18.3 by 18.1 inches (HWD) and weighing 23.2 pounds, the MB2120 has the same footprint as all other Maxify all-in-one (AIO) printers, including both the MB2720 and the Canon Maxify MB2020, which the MB2120 replaces. All of these models come with 50-sheet automatic document feeders (ADFs). But the MB5000-series models have duplexing ADFs, and the MB2000 machines do not. A duplexing ADF has the ability to scan two-sided documents automatically, without your having to flip pages manually. To get an auto-duplexing ADF, you’d need to step up to either the MB5120 or the two-drawer MB5420.

Whereas the MB2720 comes with a 3-inch touch screen for configuring the machine, and printing from and scanning to cloud sites and USB thumb drives, as well as other walk-up, or PC-free, tasks, the MB2120 has only a 2.5-inch non-touch LCD. That display anchors a larger control panel with several buttons for navigation and other functions, as well as a few status indicators.

• Connectivity and Mobile Printing

Basic connectivity options include Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and a direct USB connection. Keep in mind with that last option that your printer is not connected to the Internet, and therefore can’t take advantage of some of the MB2120’s cloud and mobile features.

Many of today’s office printers, including entry-level models like this one, come with peer-to-peer protocols such as Wi-Fi Direct and near-field communication (NFC) for connecting your mobile devices to the printer without either device being part of a network. Canon has taken a somewhat different approach here. Much of the MB2120’s mobile connectivity is handled through the company’s own Canon Print Business app, as well as Maxify Printing Solutions. These and other Canon utilities provide not only mobile connectivity options, but they also assist with connecting to cloud sites, such as Google Cloud Print or Microsoft OneDrive.

• Print Speed

Before discussing how fast this AIO prints, it should be pointed out that PC Labs recently updated its benchmarking regimen; as a result, our database doesn’t yet contain many entry-level, low-volume inkjet AIOs like this one, which limits our ability to make many direct print-speed comparisons between this Maxify and its competitors. We have, however, reviewed the entry-level, low-volume Epson WorkForce WF-2760 All-in-One Printer. In many ways, including price and features, it and the Maxify MB2120 are comparable, even though the WorkForce model is, depending on what you print, considerably slower.

Canon rates the Maxify MB2120 at 6 seconds for the first page out and 19 pages per minute (ppm). During our tests on a Windows 10 testbed with an Intel Core i5 processor, while printing our lightly formatted text document, the MB2120’s first-page-out time was below Canon’s rating (8 seconds) and it completed the job a little faster (20ppm). As we added formatting, color, graphics, and embedded images, the MB2120 bogged down significantly, dropping to 7.8ppm.

This time, though, there was only a 1.6ppm difference between this Maxify and the WorkForce WF-2760 (6.2ppm), which would be a shortcoming on a machine with a higher volume rating, but which matters less here. In addition, the MB2120 printed our 4-by-6-inch test photos at the rate of one every 43 seconds, an average time among the Maxifys we’ve tested lately, and 23 seconds faster than Epson’s comparable WF-2760 AIO.