Canon Printer FAQ: WPS Button, Bluetooth Setup, and the Cost Side of Buying

If you're looking for the WPS button on a Canon printer or trying to work out a Canon printer Bluetooth setup in a busy office, you've found the right page. I handle procurement for an 85-person company, and for the past six years the printer budget has been my responsibility. That means I've become the unofficial holder of office printer knowledge: I know where the manuals live, which buttons work when the Wi-Fi is having a bad day, and where the pricing traps are hiding.

A quick note before the FAQ. I don't have hard data on every Canon printer sold, and I'm not an engineer. What I have is an invoice history, a support ticket log, and a cost tracking sheet that I built after one expensive procurement mistake. If your office prints in a very different way, trust your own numbers over anyone else's experience.

Setup questions that come up in every office

Where is the WPS button on a Canon printer?

WPS stands for Wi-Fi Protected Setup. It's a shortcut for connecting a printer to your wireless network without typing the Wi-Fi password into a small display. On many Canon PIXMA and imageCLASS printers, the WPS button is labelled with the letters WPS or shown as two curved arrows chasing each other. You press the WPS button on your router, then press the WPS button on the Canon printer within two minutes, and the printer joins the network by itself.

Not every Canon printer has a physical WPS button. If yours doesn't, open the printer menu, find Wireless LAN Setup, and look for WPS Push Button Method. Same result, different path. One warning: if you're on a corporate network, check with IT before using WPS. A lot of security teams disable it. If it's disabled, pressing the button won't help; connect with a USB cable or the Canon PRINT app while you set up the network manually.

Canon printer Bluetooth setup: how is it actually done?

First, confirm that your Canon printer actually has Bluetooth. Many Canon office printers use Wi-Fi Direct rather than Bluetooth, and people waste a lot of time looking for a Bluetooth button that isn't there. If Bluetooth is listed on the model's specification page, the setup usually goes through the printer's wireless menu and the Canon PRINT app. Put the printer in connection mode, open the app, pair the printer with your phone, and then let the app send the Wi-Fi network details to the printer.

Keep your phone close to the printer during the process. On most of the Canon models I've overseen, Bluetooth handles the discovery part; Wi-Fi handles the actual print job. If your model doesn't support Bluetooth, don't buy a cheap Bluetooth adapter to make it work. Use Wi-Fi Direct instead. It's more reliable and doesn't require an accessory.

How does a printer work? (and why should a buyer care?)

Inkjet printers spray tiny amounts of liquid ink through microscopic nozzles in the print head. Laser printers use toner powder and static electricity to form an image on a drum, then heat to fuse the toner into the paper. Both approaches create words and images from tiny dots, but their cost profiles are very different.

If you print mostly black text in high volume, a monochrome laser printer usually wins on cost per page because toner cartridges last longer and the machine is designed for workload. If you need color and print fewer pages, an inkjet such as a Canon PIXMA has a lower entry price. The tricky part is color coverage. A page with lots of dark blue or photo background consumes much more ink than a page with a small logo. Spec sheets tell you print speeds and droplet sizes, but they don't tell you how much a typical page in your office really costs. That estimate has to come from your own usage.

When I see a buyer compare two printers only on machine price, I always want to show them the rest of the page. The printer body is one line in the total cost. Ink, toner, paper waste, maintenance, and support contracts are where the budget grows.

The cost questions that should come before the purchase order

What do I do with a percentage increase calculator when reviewing printer expenses?

A percentage increase calculator is useful because supply pricing rarely increases in round numbers. In a 2024 vendor quote, our standard Canon black cartridge moved from $68 to $79. Without doing the math, I would have called it roughly 10%. It was actually 16.2%. That difference changes how I talk to finance and whether I ask for another quote.

I also use the same calculator when suppliers quietly change page yield instead of price. If a cartridge stays at the same price but the yield estimate drops by 15%, you're paying a higher cost per page. The cartridge price looks flat, but the effective increase is not zero.

Where does a scientific notation calculator fit into printer comparisons?

Mostly it fits when you're checking specifications that are written like a physics exam. Ink droplet size, for instance, is shown in picoliters. A picoliter is 1 x 10^-12 liters, and printer manufacturers will list something like 2.0 pL or 3.3 pL. A scientific notation calculator helps when I want to convert those numbers without losing track of zeroes.

The more practical reason to keep one handy is to avoid over-indexing on irrelevant precision. Droplet size matters for photo printing; it matters much less for a machine whose job is shipping labels and expense reports. Use the calculator to understand the spec, then go back to the numbers that affect your annual budget: total cost per page, uptime, and support response.

How do I compare cost per page without an MBA in printer math?

The basic formula is simple: divide the cost of the consumable by its page yield. If a toner cartridge costs $89 and is rated for 3,200 pages under the usual test conditions, the toner cost per page is about $0.0278. If you're looking at ink tanks or high-yield cartridges, the same formula applies.

Two warnings here. One: rated page yield is not the same as real-world yield. Page coverage affects it a lot, which is why the standard test uses a certain coverage assumption; your actual documents may differ. Two: if you compare printers given different yield assumptions, you're not really comparing them. I keep a small spreadsheet with the specific yield used by each manufacturer, not just the headline number.

Why is the lowest quote sometimes not the best deal?

In Q2 2023, I reviewed two quotes for a high-volume Canon office printer. The second quote looked about $350 cheaper on the first line. Once I added installation, the warranty our purchasing policy requires, and operator training, the supposedly cheaper quote ended up roughly $470 more than the first option. That isn't because the first vendor was generous; it's because the second quote didn't include the same scope.

My view after years of this: the lowest valid quote is the one you want if it covers the full scope. But a lower number that leaves out pieces is not a lower price, it's an incomplete price. Before I approve anything, I want to know what is included and what is extra. That sounds obvious, but it is the exact place where I've watched people save $200 on paper and lose more than that on installation, cables, setup time, and service visits.

Which Canon printer should my office buy?

I can't answer that with a model number because the right choice depends on monthly volume, color coverage, and how much failure costs you. Our office uses a Canon PIXMA for color presentation prints and a Canon imageCLASS monochrome printer for day-to-day documents. That mix works because we don't run high-volume photo production and we care about keeping per-page costs predictable.

If you're in a design shop, print a lot of color, or have a regulated environment with special security requirements, your answer will be different. Test the machine in your environment if you can, calculate the per-page cost with real page samples, and treat warranties and support as part of the purchase. A printer should justify itself in the budget review, not just in the box-opening photo.

Prices and yields in this article are from my own 2024 procurement records and vendor quotes. Verify current pricing and manufacturer specs before you commit.