What Printer to Choose?

Home vs. Office. For home users who print documents occasionally and for various purposes such as school projects, a color inkjet printer would be sufficient. The entire family will enjoy the color output. For office users who print daily, the speed and reliability of a laser printer will be appreciated. For a well budgeted office, it’s recommended to have both types of printers to meet the requirements of different purposes.

Black White vs. Color. To most people laser printing means black and white and ink printing means color. Color printing has come a long way. The result could be amazing. It’s great for banners, brochures, newsletters, report covers, art design, marketing materials, greeting cards, and other fun projects. However, inkjet printers are often slower, costs more per page, requires more frequent change of ink cartridge, and is more prone to reliability issues. Ink printers are best for photographs.

Laser printing is much more mature now. It’s fast, reliable, and inexpensive. It’s great for documents, simple graphics, and faxes. However, it’s mostly only black and white.

USB vs. Parallel. A USB printer allows you to connect it to a computer without powering down the computer first. Coupled with plug and play technology, a USB printer is very easy to set up and share bring computers. In comparison, a parallel printer requires restarting a computer after connection and disconnection.

Which InkJet printer to choose?

When deciding on which of the many Inkjet printers available they’re a few things you need to consider first. What are you going to use this printer for and how much are you looking to spend?

What are you going to do with this printer?

The reason this question is first, because if you don’t consider what you are going to print you can’t match the printer to your needs.

What size of prints are you looking for matter a great deal. If you plan to print 8 x 10 pictures and maybe a 11 x17 calendar, you must buy a printer that is capable of handling what is called tabloid paper. If you only plan to print 4x6 photo’s and letters and no larger than 8x10 pictures than a smaller inkjet will work fine.

Is this printer being used in a personal use environment or is it a high volume business environment? Mind you this can be either in a home office or a traditional business setting. The question remains the same, some home businesses have a printing volume equal too to greater than a traditional business setting. The reason for asking this question is inkjet printers are categorized into to basic categories: personal use and business use.

Personal Use

These printers are designed to handle low volume and high quality images at specific speeds. Printers are rated by their ability to print at a given speed and still generate acceptable quality prints. The inkjet printers that fall under the personal use category are designed to be used at home on small household projects like family greeting cards, personal letters, occasional pictures of family. These printers are generally small, compact and relatively quiet. These printers are broken down into two sub categories Photo or Professional or General use.

Photo or Professional

As you maybe able to guess what these two types of printers can do. These printers are capable of creating high quality photo images, they use specific ink cartridges and printheads along software enhancements to create the higher quality images. These printers also come in two different sizes; wide format and standard format.

Wide format is for printing on media that is wider that 8 x10 and standard is used to print on media up to 8x10.

General Use

These general use printers are designed to print a wide variety of print jobs. Simple text letters, email and kids term paper. A flyer for a garage sale or a notice of a lost animal with a picture. These type of things that don’t require high quality pictures are perfect for these type of general use printers. Now, again these printers are very capable of print photo quality pictures but not anywhere near a good quality as the photo or professional grade printers.

Business Printers

These printers are generally wide format printers, but they are capable of printing on most sizes of media. The wide format means that they are not limited to 81/2” wide media. These are rugged and can handle the larger volume of printing found in most business environments. One reason they are able to handle the larger volume of printing is because the ink cartridges are larger and hold more ink. These printers generally don’t have the cartridges that load on the print carriage, they generally plugged into slots in the front or top behind a cover and tubes there are used to deliver the ink to the printheads. Because of that fact these printer will have a slower warm up time, with having to prime the ink pump and all it can take time.