If your office prints every day — contracts, invoices, statements, letters — you already know a printer isn't something you buy once and forget. A printer is a recurring monthly expense, and the price of the machine itself is the smallest part of the story. This year the math matters more than ever, because the cost of every kind of electronics is moving up thanks to a global memory shortage that has turned the market upside down.
What is happening in the market this year
The short version: AI data centres have swallowed the world's memory manufacturing capacity. Fabs have shifted their lines toward high-margin HBM memory, squeezing the share left for ordinary memory. The result is that DDR4 and DDR5 prices have jumped roughly 80 to 90 percent quarter over quarter, and some suppliers have warned customers to budget for a further 10 to 20 percent every month through the end of 2026, with the shortage expected to run into late 2027 or 2028.
The wave hasn't stopped at RAM. IDC expects average computer prices to rise by as much as 8 percent during 2026, and some manufacturers have already started selling prebuilt machines with no RAM at all. Major makers such as Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer and ASUS have warned customers of list-price increases of 15 to 20 percent on units shipping in the second half of 2026. At the same time, makers of passive components — capacitors, resistors and inductors — have raised their prices too, and those parts sit inside almost every electronic device, printers included.
There are no published printer-specific numbers the way there are for computers, so nobody can promise you a precise figure. But the direction is clear: component costs are rising, and any office machine you buy today deserves sharper math. The difference with printers is that the biggest share of their cost was never the purchase price in the first place — it is the toner.
What this actually means for you
The number to know before anything else is cost per page. Going by global market averages, a black-and-white page on a laser printer costs somewhere around 5 to 8 cents, while a colour page runs 12 to 15 cents and can reach 60 cents on pages packed with photos and graphics. And a typical office worker prints about 10,000 pages a year.
Turn that into your office's numbers: five staff means roughly 50,000 pages a year. The gap between an average of 6 cents for a black-and-white page and 13 cents for a colour one comes to about 3,500 dollars a year — more than the price of the printer itself in most cases. That is why most well-run offices buy two machines: a black-and-white unit to carry the daily load, and a colour one for the jobs that genuinely need colour.
- Watch the toner yield, not just its price: a standard cartridge gives you 2,500 to 4,000 pages, while high-yield cartridges reach 10,000 and 12,000 pages. A pricier cartridge with double the yield is actually cheaper.
- Laser versus inkjet: toner delivers a cost per page 60 to 80 percent lower than inkjet, which runs 7 to 20 cents a page. If you print a lot, laser isn't an option — it is a requirement.
- The duty cycle is not a target: the duty cycle figure printed in the spec sheet is a theoretical maximum, and the recommended monthly volume is usually only about 10 percent of it. Don't buy a machine whose ceiling equals your actual print volume, because it will wear out fast.
- Duplex and networking: automatic two-sided printing cuts your paper bill in half, and a network or Wi-Fi connection keeps staff from crowding around a single machine on a USB cable.
A printer to match every office
If you print hundreds of pages a day and most of it is black and white — a law firm, a contracting company, a clinic, a government department — what you need is an office copier class machine, not a desktop printer. The Canon imageRUNNER 2425i sits in that class: black and white, toner included, built to run all day without stopping. A machine this size pays for itself within a year if your print volume really is high.
And if your work needs colour at volume — marketing material, catalogues, reports full of graphics — the colour version of the same family is the Canon imageRUNNER C3326i. Here the rule flips a little: count how many colour pages you really print in a month before you decide, because a colour page costs several times what a black-and-white one does, and the machine is only worth it if colour is a core part of your business.
For mid-sized offices that want colour without committing to a big copier, the Canon i-SENSYS MF754Cdw II packs three functions into one machine: printing, copying and colour scanning. That size suits a team of ten to twenty people printing a mix of ordinary and colour documents.
But if 90 percent of your printing is black and white — and honestly, that is most Iraqi offices — there is no reason to pay extra for colour you will never use. The Canon i-SENSYS MF465dw is a monochrome multifunction machine aimed at exactly this use: a heavy daily load and a low cost per page.
Same logic a step lighter: the Canon i-SENSYS MF453DW offers black-and-white printing, copying and scanning with Wi-Fi, a practical choice for an office of five to ten people sharing one machine over the network instead of taking turns on a USB cable.
The Brother DCP-L3551CDW is a different kind of option: a colour LED laser three-in-one, smaller and cheaper, suited to small offices and shops that need colour now and then — coupons, logos, colour forms — without stepping up to the big machines.
And if the budget is tight and all you need is a machine that prints, copies and scans in black and white and simply works, the Xerox WC3025BI with Wi-Fi covers that for a small office or a shop. Treat it as the starting point: fine for someone printing dozens of pages a day, not hundreds.
The bottom line, and advice that keeps
The rule that doesn't change when prices do: buy on the basis of your monthly print volume and your cost per page, not on the sticker price on day one. A printer that is a hundred dollars cheaper but costs you two cents more per page becomes the expensive one within months if you print heavily. Ask two questions before you buy: how much does a toner cartridge cost, and how many pages does it give? Divide one by the other and that is your real answer.
In a season when almost every electronic device is getting more expensive, the smartest move is neither to delay nor to rush — it is to buy the right size once. A machine bigger than you need is money sitting idle; one that is too small means breakdowns, downtime and a high cost per page. Fix your monthly number first, then choose. Every machine listed above is available with delivery to all of Iraq's provinces and cash on delivery, so you can see it before you pay.
