What is the best printer for small business printing?

If you’re a small business looking for a high-volume printing solution, then you might have a laser printer in mind, such as a Canon i-SENSYS multifunction laser printer. But a refillable Canon MAXIFY printer could be the perfect fit for your workspace, helping you to maximise your productivity and minimise costs.

The Canon MAXIFY GX range of MegaTank printers deliver super-low running costs without compromising on print quality. These high-yield devices enable you to spend more time printing and less time changing inks.

Take the Canon MAXIFY GX7140 and MAXIFY GX6140, for example. These MegaTank printers can print up to 14,000 high-quality colour pages with a full set of ink bottles, and up to 21,000 pages when the printers are used in Economy mode. If you’re a business printing around 1,000 pages a month, that’s a whole year of printing without having to worry about inks.

"These types of printers are designed for high-volume small businesses," says Canon Europe inkjet specialist Zubair Rahim. "They're ideal for estate agents who print flyers and property brochures, restaurants that routinely update menus, or retailers who need to print signage and posters. The MAXIFY GX printers can accommodate card and thicker media, so they're great for creating point-of-sale assets too."

Accountants and solicitors will also benefit from a reliable high-volume printer. "In addition to printing out invoices, forms and labels, these types of businesses often need to print numerous documents that require signatures," Zubair says, "They're handling these pages a lot too, so the durability of the ink we use is important to them as well.

"MegaTank printers are also ideal for designers, marketing agencies and other businesses in the creative industries, where they can be used to print on-demand to hit a project deadline rather than having to outsource it. Having a full-colour printer that can print great images as well as text is very helpful."

Not all businesses need high-volume printing, of course. Perhaps you print only one or two invoices a week, or you have a fixed product line that doesn't require regular updates to marketing material. In this case, you may be looking for a printer with a lower upfront cost. An all-in-one cartridge-based printer such as the Canon PIXMA TR4755i Series might be a good choice here.

However, if you're a growing enterprise that needs to scale up, enhance your printing capability and boost productivity, then a refillable Canon MegaTank printer is a more cost-effective option.

"While Canon's MAXIFY MegaTank printers are a higher initial investment, they have much lower running costs," Zubair says. "The exceptionally high yields really drive down the cost per page."

The low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of these MegaTank models delivers significant savings. "How we calculate TCO for the printers is the cost of the hardware plus everything that you’ll spend on printing over the life of that printer,” Zubair explains. "So that’s the price of the consumables – the ink, the maintenance cartridge and the printer's power consumption – over the time you’re going to use that for, which is typically three to five years for business printers."

TCO is a practical tool that a business can use to see how much it's going to save with a refillable MegaTank printer versus other models, Zubair says. "We've calculated that savings of up to 90% on TCO¹ can be made compared to the top 10 laser and inkjet cartridge models, thanks to the very high yields and low cost per page."

One of the misconceptions about refillable ink tank printers is that they’re messy to refill and maintain. In fact, Canon's MAXIFY GX printers have a user-friendly design that ensures they’re easy to set up and look after without IT support.

The ink bottle nozzles have an anti-spill design, Zubair explains, with a key mechanism that means each bottle fits only the correct ink tank, so you'll always get the colour right.

Modern MegaTank inket printers such as the MAXIFY GX7140 and MAXIFY GX6140 have a compact design that doesn’t take up lots of office space. They're fast, too. "One of the distinct advantages of these two MegaTank models in particular is the first-page-out time," says Zubair, "which is around 7 seconds for a colour page and 5.5 seconds for a mono page from hitting print on a PC.² So, if you are in a rush or forgot to print documents before doing a presentation, then you're not going to have to wait a lot of time."

These MegaTank printers enable you to elevate your output, with consistently high-quality prints even in Economy mode. They use pigment ink, which is smudge- and scratch-resistant and also delivers laser-like print quality with sharp text plus the bold colours you associate with Canon inkjet printers. If you run a hospitality or e-com business then you'll appreciate the dedicated barcode and QR code setting, which delivers finer detail, but even in standard printing mode they resolve small characters, symbols and lines clearly.

User maintenance is simple too. MegaTank printers are designed for businesses that print frequently rather than letting the printer sit idle for a month or two, so printhead clogging is unlikely to be an issue. "These Canon MAXIFY MegaTank printers automatically run through a regular printhead cleaning routine to eliminate that kind of error anyway," Zubair says.

The MAXIFY GX7140 and MAXIFY GX6140 are equipped with a maintenance cartridge as well. Traditional cartridge inkjet printers have a waste pad that absorbs surplus ink during cleaning routines or when you do borderless printing. But once that waste pad has reached capacity, the printer must be sent back to the manufacturer or service centre for the waste pad to be replaced.

"With either of these MAXIFY GX printers, the maintenance cartridge is replaceable by the user," Zubair says. "When the pad is full, you simply buy a Maintenance Cartridge MC-G01, replace it and you're good to go. You don't have to send the printer off, which improves business uptime."

Features such as the maintenance cartridge and high-capacity ink tanks ensure that businesses can get on with printing and spend less time on maintenance.

Find out more about the benefits of MegaTank printers.

"In these Canon MAXIFY GX printers, you'll find essential security enhancements such as being able to lock the printer screen with an admin password," Zubair explains. "So, if you're running your business from a shared office environment, only people with the password will be able to access the printer. You can also add watermarks and stamps to printed pages to indicate confidential documents."

Automatic firmware updates come as standard, so if there are any security patches that need to be applied then those are automatically sent to the printer over Wi-Fi.

More robust streaming protocols are implemented on the MAXIFY GX7140 and MAXIFY GX6140 too, Zubair confirms: "WPA3 and TLS 1.3 encryption protocols provide a secure remote printing solution. This means that whatever you're sending to the printer is encrypted to the industry standard and can't be deciphered. A business can be confident that this type of printer is as secure as it can be."

Discover more secure printing features of Canon MAXIFY inkjet printers.

For a small business purchasing a MAXIFY GX refillable ink tank printer, short-term and long-term running costs will be the major consideration, Zubair suggests. "Being able to print up to 21,000 sheets in Economy mode on the MAXIFY GX7140 or MAXIFY GX6140 drives down the cost per page, which is a fraction of the price compared to traditional inkjet cartridge or laser printers."

That feeds into TCO, he adds: "So the lower the cost per page, the less that machine is going to cost you over a period of three, five or seven years, or whatever that might be."

Use the Canon TCO calculator to see how much you can save over the lifespan of a MAXIFY printer versus laser and inkjet printers.

Laser printers are known for their quick printing speeds, sharp text quality and good levels of security, but Canon MAXIFY GX MegaTank printers deliver further benefits. "They can print on a wider variety of media," Zubair highlights. "Laser printers have to fuse the toner onto the paper or media, which you can't do with certain substrates – magnetic media, for example. With Canon MAXIFY GX inkjet printers, you also have lower energy consumption."

Their large 6.9cm colour touch screens make these printers easy and efficient to use, and you can also operate them wirelessly using the free Canon PRINT app on a tablet or smartphone, as well as print from and scan to cloud services.

For added convenience, the Canon Small Business Print Hub provides a wealth of background information and case studies, for ideas on how to really get your message across in print. In addition, Canon PosterArtist puts thousands of customisable designs at your fingertips, so you can create professional looking posters, banners and flyers quickly and directly in-house.

The best choice for your business will depend on your budget, requirements and print volume, but compact MegaTank printer models such as the MAXIFY GX7140 and MAXIFY GX6140 are among the best printers for small and growing businesses. Their benefits include high quality, high page yields and low cost per page, as well as maximum business uptime and unrivalled low total cost of ownership. Whether you're looking to make cost savings or quickly scale up, an investment now could realise dividends in the future.

Written by Marcus Hawkins