In November of 2023, I was standing in my home office at 11:47 p.m., staring at a blinking orange light on a printer we'd owned for exactly six weeks.
My daughter had a GPA calculator spreadsheet to print for her high school scholarship application — due in the morning. I had a stock calculator report to pull for my accountant. And the printer was just sitting there, flashing that orange light with this sort of patient, almost smug rhythm. Nothing printed. Nothing scanned. The device wasn't even visible on my network.
That machine was a Canon Pixma TS6420a wireless inkjet all-in-one printer, purchased with high hopes and a reasonable credit card charge. Six weeks earlier, I thought it would solve all my printing headaches. Turns out it created a new one that took me three months to solve.
Honestly? The fix ended up taking 90 seconds. But getting to that fix nearly cost me my sanity.
Going in blind
I run a two-person consulting business out of our home. We print maybe 200 pages a week — client invoices, signed contracts, USPS shipping labels, the occasional grant proposal. My old Canon printer died suddenly in October 2023. One minute it was printing a 40-page contract, the next it made a noise I can only describe as a dying engine and stopped feeding paper altogether.
In hindsight, I should have thought more carefully about what I actually needed. A proper Canon business printer — something rated for daily, high-volume work. Instead, I read a few reviews, saw the words "best for home office" attached to the TS6420a, and hit buy. The price seemed right. The wireless feature seemed convenient. I didn't realize I was buying into a setup process that would test my patience for an entire quarter.
The first red flag should have been the setup CD. A literal, physical CD-ROM. In 2023. I had to dig through a drawer to find a laptop with a disc drive.
The 3-month spiral
Here's the question I typed into Google more times than I'd like to admit: "how do I get my printer online?" The answer, it turned out, involved a lot of things I didn't know about my own router.
My first attempt used that CD. It installed the driver but never completed the Wi-Fi setup. I deleted it and reinstalled it. Same result. Then I downloaded fresh drivers from Canon's website, ran through the guided setup again, and got the same frustrating failure: the printer would connect to my network briefly, then drop off after a few minutes.
What most people don't realize is that consumer inkjet printers like the TS6420a typically only support 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. My router broadcasts both 2.4GHz and 5GHz under a single SSID, which confuses the printer. It kept trying to latch onto the 5GHz band, failing, and silently disconnecting. I spent two whole weeks resetting my router, reinstalling drivers, and reading forum threads at midnight before I understood that basic hardware limitation.
Here's something vendors won't tell you: the setup guides in the box and on the website are written for people who already know what they're doing. If you're new to modern wireless networking — if you don't know what a "difference between WPA2 and WPA3" is, for example — you're going to struggle. And if you're like me, you'll blame the printer before you blame your router.
By week three, I'd tried just about everything:
- Resetting the printer's network settings through its touch panel at least five times
- Reinstalling the drivers on both my Windows laptop and my wife's Mac
- Using Canon's PRINT app on my phone (which could scan but not print — supremely unhelpful)
- Manually assigning a static IP address. Don't ask.
- Finally buying a USB cable and using it as a wired printer, which worked but defeated the entire purpose of a wireless all-in-one
The pressure was real. My daughter's GPA calculator worksheet for that scholarship deadline sat unprinted for three days. I eventually drove to FedEx at 7 a.m. and paid $0.73 per page to print it there. My stock calculator report for the accountant got delayed by two weeks. And a signed contract for a client — that one almost cost me the account.
After the second week, I called Canon support. I'll give them credit: the first technician was genuinely helpful. She walked me through a full network configuration reset, cleared out the half-broken Wi-Fi settings, and got the printer online in about 20 minutes. I was thrilled.
Then I installed a firmware update the printer had been nagging me about. And it went offline again. That night, I wrote in my notebook: firmware updates reset network settings on consumer printers. Check for this before updating. Note to self: confirm this is a known pattern before the next update.
Ten years ago, you plugged a printer into your computer and it just worked. That's the era we all remember — the era that makes us think printer setup should be effortless. Today, with dual-band routers, security protocols, mobile apps, and cloud printing, the situation has changed completely. The old "plug and play" thinking doesn't apply anymore.
The breaking point came when a client called me on a Friday afternoon asking where a contract was. My printer was offline again. I had two hours to get everything working, or I was going to look unprofessional. Normally I'd have gone to a print shop, but with the deadline and the specific formatting required, I needed my own equipment.
So I called Canon support a second time.
The second technician asked a question nobody else had thought to ask: "What security protocol is your router using?"
I checked. It was set to WPA3, the newest standard. And that, apparently, was the entire problem. The Canon Pixma TS6420a doesn't fully support WPA3. It can see the network, but it can't maintain a stable connection. The fix was embarrassingly simple: go into my router settings, switch the security mode from WPA3 to WPA2/WPA3 mixed, and save. Total time: 90 seconds.
The printer connected immediately and stayed connected. I printed a network status page just to confirm — the technician taught me that trick: hold the Stop button for five seconds while the printer is idle, and it prints a page showing your IP address, signal strength, and firmware version. That page confirmed everything was stable.
I sat there staring at that beautiful, fully printed network status page for a full minute.
What I'd do differently
So let me give you the checklist I wish I'd had from day one. I've been handling document workflows for my small business since 2019, and I've personally made and documented seven significant printing mistakes — this was number one, totaling roughly $700 in wasted budget (ink I abandoned, paper I wasted, hours I'll never get back). I maintain our team's checklist now. This is it:
- Check your router's band settings before anything else. If you have a dual-band router broadcasting 2.4GHz and 5GHz under one SSID, split them temporarily during setup. Connect your Canon printer to the 2.4GHz network.
- Verify your security protocol. If your router uses WPA3 exclusively, switch it to WPA2/WPA3 mixed mode. Many consumer printers from the last few years don't support pure WPA3.
- Run the printer's network settings page after setup. Hold Stop for five seconds. This tells you exactly what connection the printer sees, including signal strength.
- Be cautious with firmware updates. They can reset your network configuration. If the printer asks you to update firmware, assume you may need to reconnect it to Wi-Fi afterward.
- If you're stuck, call support. I don't say this lightly — I'm the kind of person who reads manuals and avoids phone calls — but the second Canon technician solved in five minutes what I couldn't solve in three months.
And yes, I should have called earlier. In hindsight, waiting that long was its own kind of mistake.
Who is this printer actually for?
Now let me address the other question people have been asking me — because once I posted about my experience, a few friends in the same situation wanted to know whether the TS6420a is worth it.
The Canon Pixma TS6420a wireless inkjet all-in-one printer is, at its core, a home office machine. Once I got the Wi-Fi working, the print quality has been genuinely good. For standard documents at 300 DPI — the industry standard resolution used for commercial print quality — it produces clean, sharp text and decent color. The scanner works well for occasional document scanning, and the automatic document feeder handles multi-page jobs without jamming.
But it's not a high-volume workhorse. If your business prints more than 500 pages a month, or you need high-speed scanning, or you regularly feed specialty stock through the machine, look at Canon's business-focused lines. That's where the "canon business printer" searches come into play — models like the imageCLASS series are designed for sustained workloads, with heavier paper handling and more durable components.
One thing I wish I'd known earlier: consumer inkjet printers like the TS6420a are not designed for heavy media. If you're printing 80 lb cover stock for client handouts — that's roughly 216 gsm — you're pushing the limits of what this printer can handle. Per industry paper standards, 20 lb bond paper is about 75 gsm, and the TS6420a is happiest in that 75–120 gsm range. Check the specs on the Canon website before feeding anything heavy into it.
Also worth noting: the "up to 8.8 ipm" print speed claim on the box is technically accurate and substantiated under FTC advertising guidelines — but that number comes from a standardized test (ISO/IEC 24734) using draft mode. In real-world use, printing mixed documents in standard quality, you'll get maybe half of that. It's not a lie; it's just a laboratory measurement that doesn't match how anyone actually prints.
For shipping labels and USPS postage, the TS6420a works fine in small batches. I print maybe ten labels a week. If you're doing more than that, consider a dedicated label printer or a laser model with a straight paper path.
Bottom line
So — the printer wasn't broken. The router was the culprit. And my own expectations were the real obstacle.
I spent three months convinced I'd bought a defective machine. I almost replaced it twice. The reality is that a single router setting — WPA3 instead of WPA2/WPA3 mixed — was causing 100% of my connectivity problems. The TS6420a is a solid printer for a small home office, and it's been working flawlessly for the past four months.
If you're reading this because you typed "how do I get my printer online" into a search bar: start with the router, not the printer. Check your bands. Check your security protocol. And if you're already a couple of weeks in and ready to throw the thing out the window — call support before you break something. It might save you three months.