It was 6:15 PM on a Thursday in March 2024 when my phone rang. A product launch was scheduled for Saturday morning, and a skincare startup we'd worked with before had 1,200 sell sheets to produce. The client's Canon PIXMA TR4722 all-in-one wireless inkjet printer had made it through 200 pages before the black ink cartridge blinked and the paper feed started eating corners.
I'm a production coordinator at a mid-sized print shop. In eight years, I've handled 300+ rush orders, including same-day turnarounds for event agencies and trade show exhibitors. So when a client calls at this hour, my first question isn't "what happened?" It's "what's the deadline, and what can we save?"
The Call at 6:15 PM
Maya had bought the TR4722 in January because it was under $150 and promised wireless printing. Her team used it for order forms, labels, and the occasional packing slip. For those jobs, it was fine. For a 1,200-page sell sheet run with a Saturday deadline? Not so much.
At 8 PM, she texted me a photo. The Canon printer had started skipping lines. By 9:30, one printhead nozzle was clearly clogged. That's the part people forget about cheap inkjet printers: cleaning cycles and replacement cartridges are where the real money goes. A $149 price tag becomes a $400-a-month habit if you're printing at volume.
The Problem Wasn't the Printer. It Was the Cost Model.
Everything I'd read about small-business printing says a budget all-in-one is enough. In practice, I've seen more rush jobs blown because of a "perfectly fine" office printer than because of any vendor failure. The printer is the last thing anyone budgets for, and the first thing that breaks.
When Maya asked if she should buy a backup printer, I opened a midpoint calculator on my phone. I typed in the likely cost of the new-printer route: $99 for the Canon PIXMA TS5351 printer, plus $28 for ink, plus two hours of setup time at $35 an hour. That came to about $197. Then I typed in our overnight print bill: $680. The midpoint was around $438—which wasn't a hard break-even, but it was a reference point. Once I added the value of Maya's lost sleep and the risk of a second printer failing, the real break-even moved toward the pricier route.
I used to believe the smarter move was to buy a second cheap printer as a backup. I only changed my mind after watching Maya almost do it. The cost wasn't the $99 hardware. It was the hour of setup, the configuration pages, the alignment sheet, and the risk that a new machine's driver wouldn't play nicely with her laptop. The numbers said "buy another printer." My gut said no.
The 1 AM Decision
By 1 AM, Maya's team had produced 340 sell sheets. The rest would not have been done before the launch. We loaded the final files to our production server, and I flagged a color issue in her PDF. We reprinted the first 40 sheets with the right ICC profile and delivered everything by 6:30 AM. The launch went off without a visible disaster.
Maya later tallied up the month: $412 in ink, $67 in paper waste, and roughly 14 hours of staff time trying to work around a machine that was never designed for that job. She didn't need a cheap printer. She needed a workflow that matched the work.
The Same Math Applies to Leases, Resin, and Everything Else
The same logic applies if you're weighing a lease. A lease calculator will give you a clean monthly payment, but it won't show the per-page charge, the overage penalties, or the downtime cost when the machine goes down. I've seen clients sign a lease for a $99-a-month copier and then pay $0.09 per page plus $120 in service calls. The TCO of that lease was higher than buying a mid-volume printer outright.
In my head, I call this the resin printer vs 3d printer lesson. If you're deciding between a resin printer and a 3D printer, the machine price is only the beginning. Resin costs, replacements, failed prints, post-processing, ventilation—all of that lands in the same TCO bucket. Buying a cheaper machine can mean higher cost per finished unit.
I don't have hard data on how many consumer inkjets die during long runs, and I can't find a published duty cycle for the TR4722. But based on 300+ late-night calls, my sense is that home inkjets fail less often than people fear—and when they fail, it's always at the worst possible time. That asymmetry is the real reason to think in TCO.
The Takeaway: TCO Before Hardware
Here's the lesson I keep coming back to: purchase price is not cost. TCO includes the printer, the ink, the paper, the time, the failed tests, and the chance that a deadline collapses.
Before you buy any Canon printer—especially the PIXMA TR4722 or PIXMA TS5351—ask what you'll actually print. If it's under 300 pages a month, a home inkjet is fine. If you're printing sell sheets, proposals, or product labels in volume, think like a production manager, not a shopper. Use a total cost calculator, a lease calculator, or a simple midpoint calculator to compare options. And if someone tells you a $149 printer will handle 1,200 pages in one night? Be skeptical.
As of April 2025, Canon's product pages still frame the PIXMA TR4722 as a home and small-office all-in-one. It's a good device for light work. It's not a production tool. Verify current specs and pricing at Canon's official site before you make a choice—and then do the TCO math yourself.
My experience skews to small and mid-sized businesses that print 500 to 5,000 pages a month. If you're a home user printing 20 pages a week, ignore half of what I said. The TR4722 and TS5351 are perfectly fine for that. The problem isn't the printer—it's the job you hand it.