There are a few different types of printers on the market today. The three main types are: personal printers, low end business printers, and high end business printers. A personal printer is a small printer, usually more suited to students and small home offices. If you have a few more employees in a medium sized office, a low end business printer will be able to handle the higher print volume better. And lastly, the high end business printer will have high capability to handle large print volumes and are suited to larger businesses.
Colour or Monochrome?
If you’re only going to be printing text documents, spreadsheets, or the occasional document with a small logo on it, a black and white printer could be the best for you. The biggest advantage of a black and white printer is that all the supplies you’ll need for them are the cheapest on the market.
If you’re going to be printing more graphs, photos, and charts, then you’ll need a a colour printer. With colour printers you need to investigate and decide which one will be best for you: an inkjet, colour laser, or LED printer. Each of these printers come at a different price and will give a different product. Make sure you look at an actual printed page from each one before deciding.
What Are Your paper Requirements?
Before you buy a printer, you first need to determine how many pages you’ll be printing per day and per month. Also ask yourself whether you’ll need to print on different sizes of paper or if you’ll be printing on envelopes. Whatever your requirements, your printer’s paper tray should accommodate these needs.
If you need to print a large number of pages per month, find out the monthly duty cycle of the printer. The monthly duty cycle refers to the number of pages the printer can print per month without failing. A home printer is usually about 2000-5000 pages per month, while high end business printers can handle up to 100000 pages per month.
How Many People Will Be Using The Printer?
If there are going to be multiple people using the printer, make sure that the printer is capable of handling multiple users. Most home printers these days have wireless networking capabilities as well as ethernet cables. Most business printers will be limited to ethernet connections.
What Will Ink and Toner Costs Be?
The fact is that ink and toner will end up costing more than the actual printer over time. Because of this, you need to make sure that you buy the printer that uses the most cost effective cartridges. If you’re buying an inkjet printer, make sure that it’s one that uses different cartridges for each of the colour inks. These are by far the most cost effective inkjets. Look out when buying a laser jet printer, because the cheapest models will often require the most expensive cartridges.
What About a Mult-Function Printer?
If you need to do more than just print, perhaps you should consider an all-in-one solution. These are printers that combine multiple hardware items into one machine. The offer printing, scanning, copying, and sometimes even fax. These options could save you some money and they’ll definitely save you some space, but remember that multi-functions don’t usually perform as efficiently as their standalone counterparts.