Canon Maxify GX1050 or a Simpler Printer? A Buyer's Guide to Choosing a Canon Multifunction Printer

There's no "best Canon printer." There's the right one for your office.

I manage supply ordering for a 60-person company — roughly $80,000 a year across eight vendors, with printers and ink as the single biggest line item. I've been doing this since 2020, which means I've handled everything from "which Canon should we buy?" to "why won't my printer print" the day before a client deadline.

Here's the thing: you're not going to find one universal "best Canon printer." The machine that's perfect for one office would be a waste of budget in another. The question always comes down to which scenario you're in.

• High volume, cost-per-page obsessed. You need something like the Canon Maxify GX1050.
• Light to moderate printing. A Canon TS3522 will handle it — if you can get it back on WiFi.
• Your current printer won't print. You probably don't need to buy anything. Fix it first.

Let's walk through each one.

Scenario A: High volume. The Canon Maxify GX1050 is a genuine workhorse.

Most Canon Maxify GX1050 multifunction printer reviews lead with the same claim: it's an inkjet with laser-level running costs. After managing one in our warehouse office for a year, I'm here to say it holds up — with a qualification.

The GX1050 uses refillable ink tanks instead of cartridges. Canon rates the black ink at around 10,000 pages and color at 5,000. We got a little less than that in practice — call it 80 to 85 percent of the published rating, which is about what I expect from any manufacturer's yield numbers. Even so, our cost per page landed near one cent for black. That's laser territory. The conventional wisdom says offices should default to laser; in practice, the tank-based Maxify beat our old laser on both cost per page and everyday readability.

Honestly, this surprised me. I am not saying every office should abandon laser machines. For heavy color presentations, a laser or color copier still earns its keep. But for standard daily volume, the tank design changed our math.

Speed matters too. The GX1050 does about 11.5 pages per minute in mono, duplexes automatically, and has a 50-sheet automatic document feeder for scanning. The flatbed scanner actually does a decent job flattening crumpled receipts, which my team appreciates because it means fewer trips to the main office.

The cost math is simple arithmetic. It's not quadratic formula calculator territory. Divide ink bottle price by page yield, add paper cost, and compare against the cartridge printer you're using now. If you're over 5,000 pages a month, the tank printer pays for itself within a year. Our warehouse office runs about 6,000 pages a month, and we cut printing supply spend by a third after switching.

There's also a workflow angle the reviews tend to skip: pouring ink takes about 60 seconds and doesn't require calling a technician. No cartridge swaps, no chip errors, and a lot fewer "why won't my printer print" tickets. For the person who gets called every time output stops, that reduction in noise is worth as much as the ink savings.

One more thing if you mail invoices: USPS raised First-Class letter postage to $0.73 per ounce in January 2025 (usps.com/stamps). When every piece of mail costs the same, the only number you control is what it costs to produce the label and the paper.

Scenario B: Low volume. The TS3522 is fine — once you sort out the WiFi.

Not every office needs a Maxify. A sales team printing a few hundred pages a month is better off with a Canon TS3522. It's small, inexpensive, and perfectly fine for proposals, boarding passes, and expense reports.

But a big share of the requests I get about the TS3522 are really one issue: how to change wifi on canon ts3522 printer after the office switches internet providers. The printer doesn't die. It quietly forgets the old network — and everyone assumes it's broken.

The fix takes about two minutes:

1. Press and hold the Wi-Fi button on the printer until the Wi-Fi lamp flashes.
2. On your phone, join the Canon_ij_XXXX network (the SSID is on a sticker on the printer).
3. Open the Canon PRINT app. It finds the printer and walks you through selecting the new network and entering the password.

That's it. Two minutes. I've done this in three different offices, and it prevents the "we need a replacement printer" email every single time.

Worth noting: the TS3522 doesn't have an automatic document feeder. If you're planning heavy scanning, buy up. If you only scan occasionally, the flatbed is fine and the price is right.

Scenario C: Your Canon printer won't print. Don't replace it yet.

In 2022, I approved a $400 rush replacement for a "broken" Canon printer. The problem was a clogged printhead from sitting idle over the holidays. A cleaning cycle and a $25 cartridge would have fixed it. I only believe in checking the simple stuff first now because I ignored it once and spent money I didn't need to spend.

From the outside, a printer that won't print looks like a dead machine. The reality is the problem is usually in the network or the software layers, not the hardware. Go through this list before you call anyone:

• Is it showing offline? Try the WiFi reconnection steps from Scenario B.
• Are error lights blinking? Count the blink pattern. Canon codes different errors with different sequences.
• Is the print queue stuck? Clear it and retry. A single stuck job blocks everything behind it.
• Has the printer been idle for a while? Run the printhead cleaning cycle once or twice.

One more thing: check which printer is selected in the drop-down. More than once, someone sent a job to a printer in another building.

I don't have hard data on what percentage of "replacement" purchases are avoidable, but after five years of managing equipment in this size office, my sense is that a third of broken-printer reports are fixable in under ten minutes.

And if the printer is truly dead? That's when you use a basic calculator — not a capital gains tax calculator, just cost-per-page arithmetic — to compare a new machine and three years of supplies against what you're retiring.

How to tell which scenario you're in

If you're still not sure, answer these three questions:

1. How many pages per month? Under 2,000: the TS3522 class is plenty. Over 5,000: the Maxify GX1050 earns its place. In between: go by whether you mind refilling ink tanks.
2. Who is on call when it breaks? If the answer is "me, and I have other work to do," choose the printer with the least maintenance.
3. Did you actually try fixing the one you have? If not, you're in Scenario C — not in the buying market.

My experience is based on offices in the 15 to 100-person range, so a one-person home office or a print shop doing 40,000 pages a month might land differently. The framework stays the same, though: match the machine to the workload.

One last angle: sustainability. I prefer the tank-based Maxify partly because you're not chucking cartridges every few months. Just be careful with "recyclable" claims. Per the FTC Green Guides (ftc.gov), environmental claims have to be substantiated — a product shouldn't be called recyclable unless a significant majority of consumers can actually recycle it. The bottles through Canon's own return program fit that description, so that's the version we rely on.

Bottom line

Efficiency is the whole game in supply management. Every minute someone spends fighting a printer is a minute they're not doing their actual job. High volume? Buy the Maxify GX1050. Low volume? The TS3522 is fine — and now you know how to reconnect it. Printer won't print? Fix it before you replace it.

Match the machine to the workflow. The rest sorts itself out.