Buying Guide to Printers

Almost all places with computers, be it businesses or homes, may at one time or another need printers to handle their works. A printer is one of the key peripherals for your computer. You're not using your PC to its full potential if you can't print. Buying and maintaining printers can be rather expensive. However it is possible to purchase a printer and not have it take a huge bite out of your budget. With more printer makes and models than ever, finding the right printer at the right price is a daunting task and time consuming. Whatever your printing needs, there's a printer for you, it just takes a little patience and research to find the perfect match. This guide will help you understand what you need to consider before you buy a printer.

Buying a printer will depend on many things. You must decide exactly why you are needing to purchase a printer, what print technology is best for you, what special features you need for your printer, whether a multifunction model is economical for your purposes, and how much to spend on the printer itself and its consumables. There are several different types of printing technology to choose from, that come in all shapes and sizes, each suited for different needs.

Since there is no printer that can handle all tasks, you must decide exactly why you need to purchase a printer. Once you have a good idea of why you need to buy a printer, write down all your printing needs. This will help you while analyzing the different printers that will meet your criteria.

Then you must make a choice on the type of printer that will suit your needs. The most common choices are whether to buy an inkjet printer or a laser printer. For many computer users, the biggest difference between inkjet and laser printers is the price, with color laser printers being very expensive.

Before you make a choice, you must ask yourself some few questions; do you intend to print mostly text, graphics, or photos? Do you intend to print in monochrome or color? Are you going to be using the computer for light tasks such as printing reports and other projects or are you going to be using it for heavy commercial works like printing recipes or coloring pages? Perhaps you are looking into an inkjet printer to print marketing materials for a brand new home business.

You must consider the speed and quality of printing especially the resolution. Unless you intend on printing thousands of pages a month or need intelligent networking then an inkjet printer should be ideal for the home user or in a small home office scenario. You need a monochrome printer if your major task will be text printing. But for most graphics and photos you'll want color which means an inkjet printer or possibly a color laser.

Laser printers use a precision laser to draw letters and images on the page with toner. They use a photosensitive drum or belt that picks up an electrostatic charge wherever the laser beam hits it. The charged areas then pick up toner and transfer the toner to paper. Laser printers fall into four categories: monochrome, four-pass color, single-pass color, and solid ink. . They print more pages per minute than an inkjet printer and have a lower cost of operation over the long-term but their initial costs are higher than that of inkjet printers. Laser printers also tend to have better paper handling options. For example, they can hold more paper or make it easier to attach an extra tray for different paper sizes. A point to note is that they also produce crisper lines and edges for text and graphics than do ink jets.

After carefully considering the above points, its time to make your choice, buy your printer and get down to business. May be to simplify the whole guide to you, as a rule of thumb, inkjet printers are a must for long-lasting photos, while laser printers are best to produce speedy text documents.