Important Things to Consider When Investing in a Printer

Printers are one of those products that can fall within an astounding range of price points. You can buy a black and white laser printer for as little as $50, or splash out hundreds or even thousands on a state of the art inkjet model.  In this article, we take a closer look at three key things that should inform your decision when shopping for a printer.

Purpose

A lot of people make the mistake of spending too much money for printing features that they don’t actually use or need.  Whilst it’s true that inkjet printers produce the best images, for most home offices, a multifunction laser model like the Fuji Xerox DocuPrint CP305D Colour Laser Printer will produce images of a reasonable quality at a substantially lower running cost.  It only really makes sense to invest in a high quality inkjet printer if you are a professional designer, photographer or digital illustrator who needs access to high quality colour printing on a regular basis.

Usage

How much you intend to use a printer, and what kinds of quantities you need to print in, should also inform your decision.  If you’re a student or academic who needs to print out a lot of text, then a basic laser printer like the Brother HL-L5200DW Mono Laser Printer is ideal as it’s capable of printing up to 38 pages per minute.  For office spaces or even in situations where more than one person needs to print, it pays to invest in a printer that is at least networked and even wireless.  A larger machine is usually required because of the usage with a bigger office.  Smaller office models may be appropriate if the office has a number of them throughout the area or one large extremely fast machine can be a good management tool.  A mid price model like the Lexmark MC3326ADWE has the capacity and staying power to handle the kind high frequency usage required by larger offices, schools and libraries.

Ink

The initial cost of the printer is always a factor in your purchasing decision, however always ensure that the running costs are paramount at decision time as it is the ink or toner required to run the printer that will be the most substantial cost over the lifetime of your machine.  For example laser printers are generally more expensive to purchase initially, yet  the toner cartridges they use have much better lasting power than the ink cartridges used in most inkjet printers.  An average toner cartridge lasts for around 2,000 pages, whilst an ink cartridge can only print up to 3- 500 pages.  Given that printer ink is more expensive per millilitre than perfume, try to estimate and take into account how much ink will be needed.