Canon wants to bring down the cost of printing with affordable ink tank printers but isn’t discounting laser printers yet

Canon has unveiled six new printers targeting WFH employees, SMBs and what it calls busy households. Surprisingly, four of the printers are laser models (imageCLASS MF652Cw, imageCLASS MF275dw, imageCLASS MF273dw, imageCLASS MF272dw) with two of them being ink tank cartridges (PIXMA G4270 and PIXMA G3262); this comes at a time when at least one competitor, Epson, has announced that it is going to stop producing laser printers going forward, instead focusing on inkjet printers.

All laser printers are all-in-one models with one of them being a color multifunction printer, indicating that black and white printers are still very much the bread and butter of office printing, at least for small and medium businesses. The MF652Cw and the MF272dw will be available exclusively from Walmart from as little as $189 while the two other laser printers will go on sale through Canon online and select retailers.

(In case you are interested in discovering what the best printers are right now, we have a wide range of buying guides covering the best laser printers, the best all-in-one printers and the best ink tank printers.)

These laser printers are traditional models (with toner carriages and drums) and have fairly sizable footprints. They have a faster 30 pages per minute print speed compared to their inkjet counterpart.

Ink tank are the next big thing, literally

The two MegaTank printers are the latest models from Canon and part of a bigger trend that the big vendors are embracing in a bid to increase sales and eliminate third party consumables from the supply chain. The so-called ink tank printer category most certainly eats up margins (and reduces profitability) but they’re generally more expensive and will appeal to those who would have otherwise purchased compatible ink cartridges anyway.

The cheaper of the two models, the G3262, is the most affordable ink tank in the market to date with a suggested retail price of $199.99 and is available exclusively from Walmart. A direct replacement of the G3260, it is one of 17 MegaTank integrated ink tank printers in Canon’s range and is an entry level multi-function printer. There’s no duplex printing or scanning or any automated document feeder (ADF); also absent from the spec sheet are any references to smart printing applications. The G4270 is $50 more expensive but adds a printing app, a fax and an ADF but still keeps out duplex printing.

Still if all you want is print on the cheap, then the G3262 is a great solution although the cheapest printer to run, at the time of writing, is the G2260, the wired version of the G3260, which has been discounted to $109 right now from Amazon and comes with 50% extra cartridges.

Together with printing as a service (AKA print subscription), ink tank printers are the other big trend manufacturers are following. HP has the Smart Tank range, Epson, the EcoTank and Brother, the INKvestment tank family (although some may argue that Brother’s one is just bigger cartridges).

Our research has shown that Canon’s MegaTank models currently have the cheapest printing cost for color and monochrome prints.