At 9:17 on a Tuesday, our shipping lead walked into my office holding a barcode label that had printed in three pieces. "The Canon TR4700 is offline again," she said. Again.
I had a board foot calculator open on my second screen because I was pricing a lumber run for a retail fixture. The irony was not lost on me. I was accounting for 12% waste on oak boards, but I had ignored the waste our printer was creating in the form of reprints, overtime, and team frustration.
I'm the procurement manager at a 40-person custom millwork and packaging company. I've managed our annual office and production supply budget—about $90,000—for six years, negotiated with more than 30 vendors, and tracked every purchase in our cost system. I didn't start this job yesterday. I still bought the wrong Canon printer.
The $89.99 Decision
Back in January 2024, our old printer died. The sales director needed quotes by Friday, and we had an end-of-month shipment coming. I had two hours to make a decision. Normally I'd compare three quotes and build a TCO model. There was no time. I bought the Canon TR4700 because it was $89.99 and it was in stock. That was the whole decision process.
I still kick myself for that shortcut. If I'd spent twenty minutes on the math, I'd have seen what was coming. But I didn't, and the print volume was low—at first.
Why Is My Canon Printer Printing So Slow? I Googled It.
The first month was fine. The second month was okay. The third month, labels started crawling out of the tray. One week, a 30-label barcode job took 40 minutes instead of 10. I typed the question that has probably haunted every budget-minded buyer: "why is my canon printer printing so slow?"
The usual answers came up: print queue, drivers, high-quality mode, paper size mismatch. I set the printer to draft mode. I cleaned the print head. I updated the firmware. It got better for two days, then went right back to slug mode.
The way I see it, slow printing was the earliest symptom of a bigger problem: the machine was underpowered for the job we were asking it to do.
The Canon TR4700 Printer Offline Loop
The more serious issue was the frequent "offline" status. The printer sat six feet from the router, but it insisted on dropping off the network. We restarted the router. We reinstalled the app. We did the ritual.
Canon's support page (usa.canon.com) says sleep mode can make a printer appear offline when it's been idle. We turned off sleep mode. That helped. I'm not 100% sure it was the only cause—our old router had its own personality—but the offline message became less frequent.
The search that summed it up was "canon tr4700 printer offline." I typed it more times than I'd like to admit.
By March, someone had written "OFFLINE AGAIN" on the printer's lid in permanent marker. I don't know who. I looked up how to get permanent marker off plastic—rubbing alcohol works—but I didn't remove the message until we finally replaced the printer.
The Limit Calculator I Didn't Open
I have a limit calculator in my procurement spreadsheet. It is not a fancy tool; it's a simple rule: if a repair or upgrade costs more than 40% of replacement, stop. I didn't open it during the printer mess. Had I opened it, I would have pulled the plug at month five.
Instead, I kept ordering ink, paying our part-time IT guy to reconnect the same printer, and watching shipping overtime grow. The limit calculator would have said what I didn't want to hear: this machine is the wrong machine.
The Math I Skipped
In May 2024, after another offline afternoon with two shipments waiting, I finally ran the total cost of ownership (i.e., not just the sticker price but the whole mess). Don't hold me to the exact cents—the receipts are in our accounting system—but the outline looked like this:
- Canon TR4700 printer: $89.99
- Ink cartridges (six replacements in 12 months): $191.94
- Network troubleshooting by our IT guy: $450
- Reprinted labels and wasted supplies: $36
- Shipping overtime caused by printer failures: roughly $1,200
Total: about $1,968 in the first year. The "cheap" printer cost us nearly $2,000 before we stopped the bleeding.
What We Did Instead
We replaced the TR4700 with a Canon imageCLASS laser printer. List price was $329. It felt like a lot until I remembered the $1,968 lesson. In our first quarter with the laser printer, our actual cost per page dropped from around $0.18 to $0.03. After nine months, it has not gone offline once.
Canon's product page describes the TR4700 as a home-use printer. I should have read that as "not for a busy production office" instead of stopping at the price tag.
The Lesson I Keep Relearning
The board foot calculator moment sticks with me. When I quote a lumber job, I don't stop at the board price. I add waste, milling, delivery, and installation. That's the total cost. For printers, the equivalent is downtime, ink, IT time, and frustration.
The cheapest option is not always wrong. But the lowest price should win after you calculate the costs that come after the sale, not before it.
Part of me still likes that TR4700 as a scanner. Another part knows it is not a workhorse. If you ask me, a home printer in a production office is not a cost-saving move. It's a recurring bill that hasn't been invoiced yet.
Time is a cost, even when it doesn't show up on a receipt. Every hour we spent arguing with that printer was an hour our shipping team wasn't working. That's the line item I'll never forget.