Which ink does the Canon PIXMA TS9020 use?

The Canon PIXMA TS9020 is a six tank photo printer, and the tank list trips people up because two of the six are black. The PGI-270 is the pigment black that handles text on plain paper. The CLI-271 black is a dye black that goes into photographs, and there is a CLI-271 gray alongside it for grey tones in black and white prints.

Only the document black comes in a larger size in our record. The PGI-270XL prints 500 pages for $21.00, which is 4.20 cents a page, against 300 pages for $15.00 on the standard PGI-270, or 5.00 cents. Roughly 16 percent comes off, and there is no equivalent decision on the other five tanks.

The rest are single size and close to each other in cost. The CLI-271 black lists at $13.00 for 425 pages, so 3.06 cents a page; cyan is 3.72 cents, yellow 3.78, magenta 4.06, and the gray at $14.00 for 352 pages is 3.98. Filling every slot with an XL document black comes to $87.00. Those photo tank yields are useful for comparing one tank against another and little else, since a full bleed photograph puts far more ink on the paper than the test documents behind the rating.

Canon does not lock this printer down. Our tracker has the TS9020 as open, with no firmware block on record, so third party tanks and refills work. What can happen instead is that the printer stops reporting a level for a tank it does not recognise and asks you to confirm you want to carry on. That is a warning rather than a refusal, and the cost of it is that you are watching the print quality yourself instead of trusting a gauge.

Because the tanks are plain ink containers, the nozzles are in the machine rather than in your hand. On several PIXMA models Canon treats the print head as a serviceable part with its own latch in the carriage, and publishes instructions for reseating and replacing it, so a persistent gap in one colour is worth chasing there before you buy more ink. Start with a nozzle check either way, because it names the tank that is failing before you replace any of the six.