Despite a lot of office work moving to digital, printing is still very much part of life in some offices. Businesses are still spending a lot of money on print cartridges and for those that print a lot, the cartridge route can be quite expensive if monthly costs are totaled up.
Enter the Cannon printers that are capable of printing 7,000 pages colour and 6,000 pages black. All from just one set of ink bottles. I’ve been in the work force for a long time now and although I’m now nearly fully digital, I’ve had my share of printing in my workplace. I worked in an office where there was a lot of printing every day of every week and the toll that print cartridges took on the stationery budget was unbelievable. If anyone ever totaled up the monthly expenses over the years we would all weep. I remember I kept wishing we could just buy ink in tanks and forget about shopping for some time.
The newly introduced Cannon printers Pixma G1400, Pixma G2400 and Pixma G3400 all feature the new CISS (Continuous Ink Supply System) and each printer uses refillable ink tanks. This way, businesses are able to print high volumes of documents at a fraction of the price that would be print cartridges. This is not however meant to replace traditional printers with non-refillable cartridge system. There are still some customers who would need this, especially those who do not print high volumes. An example is small offices and home users.
“The demand for cost effective all-in-one office inkjet printers has significantly increased in the East African markets for offices where high yield printing is the norm, or home users who enjoy printing all their best photographs, these printers offer value and low cost printing, with an unrivaled page number output for ultimate productivity. We are happy to cater to this growing segment and take forward Canon’s vision of providing cutting-edge technology to business and home-office users,” said Mr. Hendrik Verbrugghe, Marketing Director, Canon Middle East & CCNA.
The printers were introduced during an event to also announce the establishment of Cannon’s new African Division which is meant to improve business within Africa. The new division will cover 44 African countries and will have local office in 4 countries including Kenya, Ghana, Egypt and Morocco. This division will make it way easier for Cannon to engage customers and this will bolster its operations across Africa greatly. Cannon has clearly seen opportunity for business growth in the rapidly evolving market that is Africa and especially in Kenya.
Launching the printers was among the first steps that the company is taking to drive customer satisfaction in this region.
Some features of the printers that Canon
- The Pixma G3400 is an all in one printer. It offers scan, copy and print.
- The Pixma G1400 offers just printing
- All the printers have print heads that do not wear out with high volumes of fast printing
- The printers feature technology that does not allow air into the ink feeding tubes, hence stability and no drying
- The ink tanks are visible, so one can see ink levels
- The ink bottles are designed for mess free refilling.
The Pixma G3400 is WiFi enabled, hence wireless printing from PC, smartphones and tablets. It is fully compatible with Canon’s print app which enables cloud printing. This is a feature I found most interesting. One can print remotely from services such as Instagram, Flickr, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Facebook among others. You can access your photos from say a browser and canon’s Easy Photoprint+ feature will allow you to access your photos, edit and print creative items such as calendars and post cards.
All the printers come with canon’s My Image Garden software. This has apps like creative park which allows users to personalize images before printing.
Costs
The Pixma G1400 goes for Kshs.19,990.
Pixma G2400 goes for 23,000/-
Pixma G3400 goes for 30,600/-
One ink bottle retails for Kshs.3,000/-