Which ink does the Canon PIXMA MX922 use?

The Canon PIXMA MX922 came out in 2013 and takes five separate tanks, a PGI-250 pigment black for plain paper text plus a CLI-251 set of black, cyan, magenta and yellow for photographs. The second black is not a packing error and not optional.

Prices make an odd shape here. The dye black costs 3.72 cents a page at 349 pages for $13.00, while the pigment black in its XL size costs 4.40 cents at 500 pages for $22.00, so the ink that prints your documents is 18 percent dearer than the ink that prints your photos. The standard PGI-250 is worse again at 5.33 cents, which makes the XL the obvious buy, though the gap it closes is narrower than most Canon step ups manage. Our data holds no XL version of the CLI-251 colours, which cost 4.36 cents a page each. Five tanks with the XL pigment black come to $74.00.

Nothing on this machine blocks third party ink. Our record shows no firmware DRM against the MX922, and at thirteen years old it is well outside anything HP style, so compatible tanks are a reasonable way to keep it going cheaply.

On the tank system the nozzles stay in the printer, so a tank is a container and nothing more. When colour goes missing, print a nozzle check and let the machine run a clean before buying anything, and if a full clean does not recover it, the head is the suspect rather than the tanks. Machines of this age that sit unused for months are the ones that clog, so print something in colour every couple of weeks and it will still be working in another decade.

A note on the tanks' future. The PGI-250 and CLI-251 went into their last new Canon printer in 2014, one model year after the MX922, and into nothing since. The family spans five machines we list, which keeps demand pooled and the compatible market busy, and that matters more each year: a freshly manufactured compatible tank has an age advantage over genuine stock that has waited in a warehouse since the family left production. How we band supply outlook, and what to do when a number goes quiet, is covered in the cartridge discontinuation guide further down the page.