In the printing industry, especially with Canon printers and other commercial print devices, the term "clicks" refers to the count of individual printed pages or impressions produced by a printer. Each time a page is printed (whether in black and white or color) it is recorded as one "click." This measurement is commonly used for:
Tracking printer usage: Service contracts and maintenance schedules often rely on the number of clicks to determine when service is needed or when consumables should be replaced.
Billing and cost management: Many commercial printing agreements charge customers based on the number of clicks, making it a standard unit for invoicing and cost analysis.
Production monitoring: Print service providers use click counts to monitor productivity, manage workloads, and evaluate equipment efficiency.
A "click" typically equals one printed side of a regular sized sheet (A4-like), so a double-sided (duplex) print job would count as two clicks. This term is widely recognized across the industry and is integral to both operational and financial aspects of print management.
NOTE
Some clicks are not initiated by operators, but, rather, by maintenance routines, such as purges. Those clicks are not counted in the totals. Generally, offline clicks are not counted as well.
The definition of a click differs based on the type of the device.
Thus, for cut-sheet printers, the formula is the most intuitive: one A4-like side is counted as one click. One A3-like, 2 and so on.
For the continuos-fed printers, one click is counted when the paper advances by 12.5 inches, regardless of the width of the roll.
For the colorWAVE & plotWAVE devices, clicks do not make sense. This printers use instead the TAC (=Total Area Clicks) concept.
For the varioPRINT iX-series printers, the print engine test charts count towards the clicks, while at the same time the system jobs (such as NUC, NAC, purges and refresh dots/lines) are excluded from this the clicks count.