What Canon PRINT Actually Does
Canon PRINT (formerly Canon PRINT Inkjet/SELPHY) is the companion app for Canon’s inkjet, laser, and compact photo printers, covering everything from PIXMA and MAXIFY to imageCLASS and SELPHY lines. It handles printer setup, wireless connection, printing documents and photos from your phone, scanning, checking ink or toner levels, and cloud printing. It’s aimed squarely at home users who bought a Canon printer and want to print or scan straight from a smartphone instead of a computer.
Where It Actually Delivers
The core promise works: printing photos and documents directly from your phone is genuinely convenient once it’s set up, and several users specifically praise being able to print photos on photo paper without touching a computer. For casual, occasional printing jobs – a boarding pass, a school worksheet, a handful of photos – the app does what it says on the tin, and setup for basic printing is straightforward for most supported PIXMA and MAXIFY models.
The Missing Controls That Frustrate Power Users
The most consistent complaint from real users isn’t that the app breaks, it’s that it’s too limited. Reviewers repeatedly note there’s no way to crop a photo before printing, only zoom, and no controls for brightness or other image adjustments. Print options are basically reduced to picking pages and copy count, with no way to choose paper size alongside picture size together. This forces people to waste ink and paper doing physical test prints just to see how a photo will actually look, which defeats the purpose of a ‘convenience’ app.
Connectivity Problems That Show Up Over Time
A recurring pattern in low-rated reviews is that the app works fine initially, then starts failing to connect – to the phone, to a PC, or even over USB – after weeks of normal light use. Multiple users describe printers that won’t wake from sleep to accept a print job, requiring a walk over to physically power the printer on, which undermines the entire point of wireless printing. Switching the printer to a different Wi-Fi network is also called out as needlessly difficult, and one reviewer specifically mentions the scan button disappearing from the app, leaving it usable only for printing.
Permissions and Everyday Annoyances
Beyond connectivity, there are smaller usability gripes: the app asks for permissions labeled ‘optional’ that the app apparently won’t function without, and there’s no way to jump straight to a specific photo album, forcing users to scroll through an entire camera roll to find an image. None of these are dealbreakers individually, but combined with the connection drops, they add up to an app that many describe as more frustrating than it should be for something this basic.
Who Should Actually Download This
If you own a supported Canon printer and only need occasional, no-frills printing or scanning from your phone, Canon PRINT covers the basics adequately. But if you print photos regularly and want cropping, brightness adjustment, or reliable day-in-day-out wireless connectivity, be prepared for real friction – this is a functional but rough-edged utility, not a polished photo-printing tool.
