Canon
imageFORCE — the great renaming
CANON
Canon enters 2026 having just finished renaming half its office range for the second time this decade. The research department admires the confidence. The dealers, we are told, admire it rather less.
Canon spent the 2000s digesting a half-century of NP and CLC engineering into a single digital platform — the imageRUNNER and imageRUNNER ADVANCE families — and spent the years since quietly assembling something odder: the broadest print-volume portfolio in the industry, built as much by acquisition as by invention. A desktop A4 printer and a web-fed production inkjet press now sit on the same org chart, which is a sentence almost no other marque in this register can honestly write.
The acquisition did the heavy lifting. Canon bought a stake in the Dutch firm Océ in 2009 and completed full ownership in March 2010 for roughly €730 million, absorbing a company whose lineage ran back to 1877 and whose VarioPrint and ColorStream inkjet engineering was genuinely best-in-class. Canon ran it as a semi-autonomous unit for a decade — long enough to learn the technology properly — before folding the name away entirely: Canon Production Printing, effective January 2020, closing a twenty-year project to own the whole print-volume spectrum under one roof.
The office side took longer to tidy up, and did so more visibly. From 2019 the imageRUNNER ADVANCE DX (A3) and imageCLASS X (A4, the 2021 Buyers Lab Line of the Year) ran as separate branded families for six years, until Canon's 2025 Summit announced “imageFORCE” — a single unified platform spanning desktop A4 devices through A3 departmental workhorses. The rollout has proceeded in waves ever since, each press release naming the exact predecessor series it retires, which counts as candour in an industry that usually prefers to let old nameplates fade quietly.
What survives the reshuffle is the range logic underneath it: imagePRESS covers colour production in toner, from mid-volume sheetfed presses up to the 135–ppm V1350 flagship, while Canon Production Printing runs a largely separate universe of continuous-feed and sheetfed inkjet — direct-lineage Océ engineering wearing a Canon badge. In 2026 the two production arms still don't fully overlap. That split, not the office rebrand, is the real shape of the company.
Canon — The Range, 2026
| Model | Year | PPM | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| imageFORCE C1935P | 2026 | 35 | compact fleet-deployment printer |
| imageFORCE 1643 / 1643F / 1643P | 2026 | 45 (mono) | replaces iR ADV DX 1643P & imageCLASS X MF1643i/iF II |
| imageFORCE C611 | 2025 | 65 | replaces iR ADV DX C568iF/C359iF |
| imageFORCE C3100 | 2026 | 26/30/35/50 | 270 ipm single-pass DADF; 30% recycled resin |
| imageFORCE 4100 | 2026 | 25/35/45 | replaces iR ADV DX 4900 series |
| imageFORCE C5100 | 2025 | 40/50/60/70 | flagship colour A3 launch wave, “AI-enabled” |
| imageFORCE 6100 | 2025 | 55/60/70 | mono companion to C5100 |
| imageFORCE 8100 | 2025 | 86/95/105 | successor to iR ADV DX 8900 series |
| imagePRESS V1350 | 2022 | 135 | fastest colour toner press; Red VCSEL, 2400×2400 dpi |
| imagePRESS C10010VP | c. 2018 | 10,000+ sheet feed class | flagship high-volume imagePRESS; 2,400×2,400 dpi |
| varioPRINT iX3200 | unverified | 320 A4 / 4,560 SRA3/hr | best-selling model in its class |
| varioPRESS iV7 | 2024 announced, 2027 US GA | 8,700 B2 4/0 sheets/hr | Canon's first B2 sheetfed inkjet entry |
The unification, unusually candid
Six years is a long time to run two office ranges that do the same job under different names, and Canon's own account of why it stopped is refreshingly blunt: dealers wanted “a clearer, more value-driven proposition,” which is corporate for nobody could remember which family was which. What impresses the research department is the paperwork. Every imageFORCE launch since July 2025 has arrived with a press release naming the exact iR ADVANCE DX or imageCLASS X series it retires — the C3100 for the C3900, the 8100 for the 8900, and so on down the line. Most manufacturers let a superseded nameplate expire quietly. Canon is filing a death certificate for each one.
The Océans still don't mix
The stranger fact is what the unification didn't touch. Canon Production Printing — the Océ-inheritance business, all continuous-feed and sheetfed inkjet — still runs as a separate organisation from imagePRESS, the Canon-native toner line. They share a customer base and, increasingly, a booth at trade shows; they do not share engineering. A varioPRESS press and an imagePRESS press descend from different companies, different countries and different centuries of colour-chemistry expertise, and in 2026 that ancestry is still legible in how each range is built.
THE VERDICT — CANON
The broadest portfolio in the register, held together by acquisition rather than architecture — which is either the smartest strategy on the shelf or the most expensive way to avoid choosing one. The one star above is for making dealers relearn the range twice in six years.