Buying Guide to Printers

First of all, when purchasing a new printer, you must first know what you want the printer to do, for instance, would you like a printer to print your digital photos on, or do you need a printer mostly for black and white text documents? Maybe you would like a multifunctional printer that ‘has it all’ (Fax, Printer, Digital Camera Dock, and Scanner).

There are so many different types of printers it is easy to feel discouraged, or confused when trying to purchase a new one.
Sizes of printers are another thing you need to keep in mind, when purchasing a new printer you need to take in to consideration where you plan to have this particular printer set up at, if you don’t have room for a big bulky printer there are plenty of other styles to choose from, quite like the decision when buying most any household items, there is always the drawback of size.

HP printers are a very highly respectable brand of printer, they come in so many different sizes and styles that you can spend hours just browsing their very impressive selection of printers.

HP printers are also excellent for business printers, such as those you would need in offices and such, also many selections perfect for the home office.

Another huge thing to consider when purchasing your new printer is do you want an ink printer or a laser printer? It may seem like an odd question, or more commonly just wondering what the difference is, well, the difference is the way the printers transfer the ink to the paper, with an ink printer, the printer uses ink cartridges with liquid ink inside and through the printer the ink is squirted onto the paper from the printer head.

Now with a laser printer the ink is in a powder form stored in what they call a “Toner Cartridge”, the printer heats the media areas that need to be printed, then the powder from the toner cartridge is attached to the paper.

Now if you want to print more often, it is a lot cheaper to purchase a laser printer, just because you won’t have to buy the ink as often as you would with an inkjet printer.

But if price is not too much of an issue for you, and you are looking to print more images than text, then you should check out a dye-sub printer. There is a major difference between inkjet, laser and dye sublimation printers, with dye-sub printers, instead of the color being transferred as an individual ‘dot’ or ‘smear’ of color on to the paper’s surface, there is a roll of cellophane looking sheets with dye imbedded in to it, as the print head heats up passing over the film it causes the dyes to vaporize and permeate onto the glossy surface of the paper before returning to solid form, this causes the ink to almost blur together with each passing of the print head creating a more real and natural look to your photos that are being printed.

Dye-Sub printers can be quite expensive, but in the long run you are probably saving yourself a lot of money printing your photos at home.

One really great Dye-sub printer is the Kodak Professional 1400 Printer, while some may think it to be a little bit noisy it is extremely easy to setup and to start using right away, it has fast print speed and great color accuracy, and while most older models of Dye-sub printers can be quite expensive the Kodak Professional 1400 Printer is pretty competitively priced.
So if you are looking to print text documents, try out a laser or inkjet printer, but if you are looking for an excellent photo printer I strongly suggest checking out a Dye Sublimation printer.