How to Select the Perfect Printer for Your Office
There are three types of printers. They are monochrome (black and white) laser, ink jet and color laser printers. Each of these printers serves a specific purpose and it will be up to you to decide which printer will be the best fit for your situation.
The monochrome or black/white laser printers offer an equal balance between price, print quality and speed. Almost every office in the world has some form of this printer. For home office user, you might want to choose this printer if you are going to be printing a lot of text documents. The monochrome laser printer is cheaper to maintain than an ink jet printer. However, if you want color then you would want to look at an ink jet printer. This printer is also faster than the ink jet due to the fact that it is only using black ink. For a printer that costs less than $500 it prints out nine to twelve pages per minute. For a printer in this price range it would mainly be used by home office users and small business owners. For a machine that costs $750 and more the pages per minute is eleven to eighteen. Another item of interest would be the print resolution. Print resolution refers to the number of dots in a square inch that the printer can output. This can be important when printing out graphics. Though if you want to print out graphics you might want to look into getting a printer that prints in color.
There are some minor considerations to consider. The first being the memory of the printer. For a printer in the less than $500 price range, the memory is between 2 mg and 8 mg. For printers above the $750 range it would be between 16 and 64 mg. The higher the memory the more pages it will print out quickly. Another consideration would be in the connections. For a home user a USB or parallel port is all that they would need to connect a printer to a PC. For business users or those with home networks they would want an Ethernet port so more than one user can share the printer. Last but certainly not least would be the paper tray capacity. For the printer that costs less than $500 the tray will hold 150-350 sheets. For the higher priced printers the tray will hold 350-650 sheets.
The second type of printer is the ink jet printer. Ink jet printers are the slowest but most affordable printers in the market. They are designed for home users, students and anyone else who is not concerned about the quality of the text. Again we will look at a few features that need to be addressed when purchasing an ink jet printer. First is the quality of the print. For a printer in the under $150 range the print is adequate to good. For printers above the $150 range the print quality is good to very good. The second item of interest would be the cost of replacing the ink cartridges. For printers under $150 the cost of replacing the cartridges would be between $20-$50. For printers above $150 the cost would be between $20-$75.
The third type of printer is the color laser printer. These are designed for those offices in which a lot of graphic art printing is done. There are very few home users who will need this type of printer. The price range for these printers falls between $2300 and $5500. The inexpensive printers which fall below $2300 have adequate to good print quality. The higher end printers will have very good to excellent print quality. The print speed when you print in color is between one and three pages per minute.
Again you will have to ask yourself what office the printer is going into and for what purpose will it serve.
