Which ink does the Canon PIXMA MG7520 use?

The PIXMA MG7520 is a six tank photo printer, which is why keeping it stocked costs more than an everyday inkjet. It carries two different blacks that cannot cover for each other: the pigment PGI-250 that prints text on plain paper, and the dye CLI-251 black that mixes into photographs. Around those sit the CLI-251 cyan, magenta and yellow, plus a CLI-251 gray. Only the pigment black has a high yield version, the PGI-250XL.

Replacing every tank at list price comes to $88.00, though the individual numbers say more than the total does. The PGI-250XL prints 500 pages for $22.00, or 4.40c, against 5.33c for the standard PGI-250 at 300 pages, so the XL pigment black is the one to buy for documents. The gray CLI-251 turns out to be the cheapest tank on the machine at 1.79c, because Canon rates it for 780 pages where it rates the colours at 298. Gray only comes into play on photographs, so that low figure has little effect on what the printer costs you across a year of ordinary printing.

There is no firmware lockout on the MG7520, so compatible and remanufactured PGI-250 and CLI-251 tanks work. On a six tank machine that is where the saving lives, and a multipack usually drops the cost further than buying tanks one at a time. Choose a seller that guarantees the chip is read and accepts returns, since a six tank printer gives an unreadable chip six chances to appear.

If a tank reads as empty immediately after you fit it, suspect the level sensor rather than the ink, and reseat the tank until its lamp comes on. When Canon reports that the level cannot be detected, holding Stop or Resume for a few seconds acknowledges the warning and lets you carry on printing. That is expected with third party ink and not a fault. Missing colours or banding across a photograph call for a nozzle check and a cleaning cycle from the printer menu before you replace a tank, because a blocked nozzle and an empty tank produce the same page.

Supply outlook is the longer term question on a machine from 2014. Canon has not fitted the PGI-250 and CLI-251 numbers to a new printer since the year the MG7520 itself arrived, which puts them among the 43 cartridge families in our catalogue with no current hardware behind them. Nothing about that is urgent, and it changes the buying pattern more than the availability: as genuine stock ages on shelves, freshly made compatible tanks gradually become the more dependable purchase. The discontinuation guide lower on the page explains how we score a family and when to start caring.