If you're comparing Canon printer price tags, stop. That number is the down payment, not the bill.
In September 2022, I bought two Canon PIXMA printers for our customer-support team because they matched the budget line. Over the next four months, we spent more on ink cartridges, setup time, and "why won't this print" frustration than on the machines themselves. The total avoidable waste was roughly $580. Not catastrophic. But embarrassing.
Compare printers by total cost of ownership (TCO), not by shelf price. TCO includes the hardware, the setup time, the supplies, the maintenance, and the random printing an office always generates. Once I started tracking those costs, every printer purchase got easier and cheaper.
I'm not an IT professional. I'm an operations manager who ended up responsible for printer purchases at a 40-person firm, and I've been signing those purchase orders since 2019. In that time, I made four bad printer decisions. Not one of them was caused by a defective product. All four were caused by an incomplete cost model.
Setup time is a line item, even when it's painless
The phrase "how to pair a Canon printer" comes up far more often than it should. Not because Canon printers are hard to set up, but because the person doing the setup is usually under time pressure. I've watched an office manager search for that phrase while the printer sat in wireless setup mode, waiting for someone to read the blinking light correctly.
Setup differs by model, so follow Canon's official guide for your exact unit. The general flow on most PIXMA models is: put the printer into connection mode, open the Canon PRINT app, and let the app handle the Wi-Fi connection. It's not complicated.
But "not complicated" doesn't mean "free." Every installation involves unboxing, firmware updates, driver checks, and a sign-in or two. When I compare purchases now, I add at least 30 minutes of labor per machine. If the person doing the setup doesn't consider themselves technical, I estimate 90. That changes the comparison.
The test page step is the cheapest insurance
Our current printer checklist is deliberately boring. Unbox. Connect. Register. Print a test page. Only then assign the printer to a user.
The steps vary by Windows and macOS version, but every operating system has a "print test page" option somewhere in the printer settings. If you can't find it, searching "print test page Canon printer" plus the model number gets you there in about a minute. That one page can prevent a much bigger waste of time.
A test page catches connection errors, bad drivers, empty cartridges, and clogged nozzles before a user sits down with a deadline. It also tells you whether the printer survived shipping. Shipping damage is rare, but when it happens, you want to know during the return window.
Ink: don't compare cartridge prices, compare cost per page
The largest recurring TCO line is usually consumables. Canon lists official page yield for its cartridges on product pages. Those yields are based on an industry testing standard, ISO/IEC 24711, and they're designed as a comparison tool, not a guarantee of what you'll actually get.
Your actual pages per cartridge will drop if you print a lot of full-color graphics, dense grays, or photo content. Simple black text will produce more pages than the estimate. The only way to know your real number is to track your own output.
This is where small habits matter. A designer who needs graph paper at 11 PM will often just print a template. A grid page looks simple, but it's covered with ink from edge to edge. One sheet isn't the issue. A team doing this regularly goes through a color cartridge sooner than the plan assumed.
Random office printing is part of the total cost
Once a printer is shared, it becomes the office utility for anything that needs to exist on paper. During tax season, an accounting assistant printed a page after searching for "no tax on overtime calculator" to double-check a payroll question. That single page cost pennies. Thirty similar one-off prints per week? Those pennies become a cartridge.
This is not a Canon-specific problem. But the brand doesn't matter once you notice the pattern.
The same thinking applies to the supplies around the printer and whiteboard. The day someone writes on a whiteboard with a permanent marker, someone else asks "how to get sharpie off whiteboard." The quick answer: trace over the permanent marker with a dry-erase marker, wait a few seconds, then wipe. Dry-erase ink contains a solvent that lifts permanent marker ink. That's a $0 answer, and it's a reminder that not every office cost requires a new product.
The counterintuitive part of printer buying
A cheap printer in a visible spot doesn't reduce printing. It invites it. The more convenient a printer looks, the more random tasks it attracts. Shared printing is only cheaper when you predicted the volume correctly.
Canon is not a brand I avoid. I've bought Canon printers for teams that print under 300 pages per month, need good photo quality, or prefer Canon's product documentation. The PIXMA line is fine for that. If your office prints thousands of pages per month, a consumer inkjet is the wrong tool no matter whose name is on it.
As of January 2025, Canon prices and page yields shift often enough that I won't quote current retail numbers here. Check canon.com/shop or your vendor's current product listings before you buy. The printer itself will probably be fine. The question is whether the math around it works.