Canon iR-ADV C3520

Our company has been using this machine for three years now. The equipment was replaced in August 2021. The previous Ricoh unit had served us for six years, but paper jam issues became increasingly severe. The repair technician visited over a dozen times, and during his final visit, he directly told us that the replacement parts had been discontinued and recommended purchasing a new machine.

At that time, the administrative department presented three options: Canon, Konica Minolta, and Kyocera. I participated in the selection process. Kyocera offered the lowest quote, but they only had one service center in our district, located in the east side of the city, while our company is situated on the west side. The Konica Minolta sales representative kept emphasizing their monthly print volume advantage, suggesting that a company of our scale should go with the C360i. Our monthly print volume is at most 8,000 pages—using that machine would be pure waste.

The Canon C3520 won the bid, primarily because of their extensive service network—there's a service station right in the office building downstairs from ours. Another reason was that our CFO had used the Canon imageRUNNER series at her previous company, so she was quite familiar with the operating interface.

After the machine arrived, Canon's engineer came to install it, and the process took an entire afternoon. Our company's network environment is somewhat complex, with two VLANs, and he spent a long time configuring print queues for both departments. I remember this incident very clearly because I had to stay late that day waiting for him to finish, and I didn't get home until after 9 PM.

Network configuration required extensive setup due to dual VLAN architecture INSTALLATION DAY

Let me talk about the actual usage experience.

The rated color printing speed is 20 pages per minute, and actual testing confirms this—I've timed it myself. Black and white printing is rated at 35 pages per minute; I haven't specifically tested this, but subjectively it feels somewhat faster than our previous Ricoh. Duplex printing doesn't require manual page flipping, a feature we use very frequently since contracts and reports are basically all double-sided.

The scanning function is what our department uses most frequently. You can scan directly to email or to a shared folder. Initially, IT configured the shared folder on the 192.168.1.xxx segment, but then the R&D department's scans kept failing. It was later discovered that the R&D department was on a different network segment. IT spent another half day reconfiguring everything.

The machine had one issue about a year and a half into use. The separation pad in the paper tray had worn out, causing two sheets to feed at once during printing. We bought a separation pad ourselves, 38 yuan on Taobao, but after installing it, occasional double-feeding still occurred. Later, we called Canon service to replace it with an OEM part, which cost around 150 yuan, and everything worked normally after that.

The drum has been replaced once so far, last October. I was present during the drum replacement, and while watching the engineer work, I noticed quite a bit of paper debris had accumulated inside the machine; he cleaned it out while he was there.

Regarding consumables, I checked our procurement records. We replace the black toner on average every four months. Color toners are used less frequently—yellow and magenta get replaced roughly every seven to eight months, and cyan even less often. We've always bought OEM toner; the administrative department previously considered buying compatible powder to save money, but after asking the service team, they said using compatible powder would void the warranty if problems occurred. So we didn't dare switch.

There are several features we've basically never used. The fax function—who still sends faxes nowadays? USB direct printing—we tried it once, but detecting the USB drive took forever, so afterward everyone just transfers files to the computer first before printing. There's also some mobile printing feature that requires installing an app. I installed it and tried connecting twice but couldn't get it to work, so I uninstalled it.

Now three years in, there haven't been any major problems overall. The service contract expires next month and needs to be renewed. Canon's quote is 6,800 yuan per year, including consumables. We're still considering whether to renew.