The 2025 Canon Printer Checklist I Use After $6,800 in Office Buying Mistakes

I am the person who handles printer purchases at a 45-person architecture and design firm. My job title has nothing to do with printers, which might be the first problem. Over the past six years, I have made—and kept a written record of—five significant procurement mistakes. They totaled roughly $6,800 in wasted budget: a machine that was the wrong class for our volume, ink for printers we were about to retire, and one very expensive urgent toner order that was not actually urgent.

I now maintain a checklist so our team doesn't repeat my errors. The 2025 version is below, because what counted as smart printer buying in 2022 has shifted. If you are the person who gets asked to buy or replace a Canon printer for a 10-to-100-person office, run through all six steps in order. Step 1 is the one everyone skips.

Step 1: Pull the print data before you look at a single model

My first real mistake was in fall 2019. I assumed our old printer was dying because it was old. The actual problem was that we were running it far past the workload it was designed for. That $179 consumer Canon handled architectural drawing sets like a sedan pulling a trailer. Instead of checking its print volume, I replaced it with another consumer unit recommended by review sites. It took about three months for history to repeat itself. To be fair, the hardware wasn't defective. It was just never built for that job.

So step one is boring: get 12 months of actual print history from the current machine. If it's networked, IT can usually pull this from the print server. If it's a standalone unit, the printer itself keeps a page counter. What I look for is the average monthly volume, the busiest month, and how much output is A3. The average alone lies. I once spent an afternoon calculating the standard deviation of our monthly page counts, using a square root calculator because I could not remember the formula. Yes, it was embarrassing. But the result showed that our volume swung between 600 pages and 4,000 pages a month, meaning we needed to buy for the spikes, not the average.

Write these three numbers down before opening any product page: average monthly pages, busiest month, and whether A3 output is a regular part of your workflow. Every later decision depends on them.

Step 2: Read actual Canon printer news from 2025, not a 2022 listicle

Most best printer articles are stale by the time you find them. I have started searching for canon printer news today 2025 once a quarter just to catch lineup changes, price adjustments, and ink-system updates before ordering.

The big theme in Canon's 2025 office announcements is the refillable ink tank line. The G-series and MAXIFY machines now sit at the center of what Canon is doing for small offices. That matters because a factory refillable printer costs more upfront but changes the per-page arithmetic completely. In 2025, the old advice that everyone should just buy a cheap cartridge PIXMA and deal with ink later looks outdated. What was best practice in 2020 is not what I would recommend in 2025.

I also check whether the exact model I want is still in production. Canon changes part numbers and cartridge generations often enough that an article from last year may reference ink that is already hard to find. Ten minutes on Canon's own support site prevents that problem.

Step 3: Look at Canon printer market share vs HP 2025 as logistics data, not a brand score

People type canon printer market share vs hp 2025 into search because they want reassurance that the brand will still have service and supplies in a few years. That is a reasonable question, but market share only gives part of the answer.

According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Hardcopy Peripherals Tracker for Q4 2024, reported in January 2025, HP ended the year with roughly 31% of global unit shipments, while Canon was around 20%. The exact number changes every quarter, and those headlines do not tell you much about office use. In the segments that matter to a small business, like A3-capable machines and integrated ink systems, Canon competes far more closely. If you need wide-format or architectural printing, the overall market share gap between Canon and HP is almost irrelevant.

We run a mostly Canon fleet now. Finance still has an HP printer that has been reliable for years. I am not going to tell you one brand is better. I will tell you that both brands have stable networks of dealers and technicians in most U.S. markets, so the safer question is which dealer is actually close to your office.

Step 4: Run the real cost per page, not the shelf price

The pricing mistake I see most often is comparing sticker prices. On a 2023 order, I approved a $169 Canon cartridge printer because the $299 tank model felt like overkill. I did not do the ink math. The cartridge unit worked out to around nine cents per black-and-white page. The tank model ran at under a third of a cent per page in black and a fraction of the color cost. By month six, the more expensive printer had become the cheaper one.

Here is the comparison I use now, based on Canon U.S.A. price-list information I checked in April 2025 and which you should verify before ordering. A G-series black ink bottle sells for roughly $15 and is rated by Canon at 6,000 pages, putting the black-ink cost around a quarter-cent per page. A standard PIXMA TS-series black cartridge sells for roughly $18 and is rated near 200 pages, which lands around nine cents a page. That is a big difference, and it only grows once you print color or heavy coverage.

I am not saying cartridge printers are bad. For a home office printing a few pages a week, the lower upfront cost makes sense. For an office printing real volume, the recurring ink cost is the bill you will feel all year. Run the calculation against your own volume from Step 1 before you decide which one fits.

Step 5: Plan the network setup before the printer arrives on the loading dock

In September 2022, my team added a Canon printer to an area that already had an HP printer used by finance. Both machines worked. Most laptops, however, could only see one of them. We lost half a day before realizing the two printers were on different wireless bands, so some computers discovered the Canon but could not find the HP. This is not a printer problem. It is a network setup problem.

The workflow I use now is simple. Assign the printer a fixed IP address or a DHCP reservation before installation. Connect the Canon and the HP to the same office wireless network, with separate, recognizable names like CANON-ACCT or HP-FINANCE. If you put one printer on a guest network or leave it in Wi-Fi Direct mode, it will appear offline to some machines. Give each printer its own name on the network so nobody has to guess which one they are printing to.

For the Canon, run setup through the Canon PRINT app or the printer's built-in wizard. If your office is mixed-brand and someone asks how to connect to HP printer, the flow is almost identical: download HP Smart, add the printer, connect it to the office Wi-Fi, and rename it to something recognizable. I now update the firmware during initial setup rather than waiting until something breaks.

Step 6: Plan the old printer's retirement at the same time

The new printer arrives, the old one gets wheeled into a corner, and three months later someone notices it is still connected to the network. That happened to us once. A decommissioned printer that remains connected is a forgotten-device security risk, because modern multifunction printers store scans, job logs, and sometimes sensitive documents.

When you retire any Canon printer that has been on your network, clear the job queue, reset the machine to factory defaults, and remove or securely wipe the internal storage if it has a drive. The Canon support site will tell you whether a specific model has internal storage. Do not assume.

For the physical unit itself, do not expect to get rich from the metal inside. When we retired five older printers, our IT lead ran an online scrap gold calculator over the logic boards just to see whether selling them separately made sense. The total value came back around nine dollars. The practical move is a certified electronics recycler or Canon's own return program. If you use a third-party disposal service, ask for a data sanitization certificate before the unit leaves the building.

The repeat mistakes that this checklist catches

If you only take one thing from all of this, take the habit of writing down the planned purchase before you submit it. In the last 18 months, this checklist has caught 47 potential errors for our team: wrong part numbers, supplies for machines we no longer own, and duplicate orders that were about to be placed by two different people. Most of those mistakes would not have been dramatic. They would have just been expensive.

• Do not buy for the average month. Buy for the peak, because the peak is what kills printers.
• Do not stock cartridges for a printer that is about to leave the building. We overordered about 20 cartridges for a model that was retired the same quarter.
• Do not ignore the per-page ink difference between a cartridge machine and a tank machine. In some comparisons, that difference is 30 times.
• Do not let the old printer keep its network access after its replacement goes live.

The most frustrating part of all this is that every single mistake I made was avoidable with better information. The checklist does not make printer buying exciting. It makes it predictable, and predictable is what keeps a budget intact.