Tips on Buying Printers

Posted on: November 4th, 2008

Today, there are literally hundreds of printer models are available. How would you choose from this selection? How do you get the best deal for what you want? Read on and you’ll see some information that I’ve collected.

The first thing to decide when you are looking for a printer is to what are you going to use it for:

Do you want to print in color, or a black and white printing would be sufficient?
How much are you going to print (large amount, or just a page here and there)?
Do you need to be able to print photo quality?

If you print mainly black and white documents, especially in larger quantities then a laser printer makes sense. The laser printer costs more initially but the $/page cost is significantly less than an inkjet printers. Remember: inkjet manufacturers make the money on the ink cartridges, not on the printers — that’s why they are so cheap.

If you want to be able to print in color then an inkjet printer (the most common printers are inkjet printers) would be the best choice. Unless you do a really large amount of printing in which case a color laser printer would be the best choice.

If you want to print photo quality images then, I believe, your best course of action would be to order the prints online from your local store. Walmart, Walgreens, Meijer, etc offer this service and according to my calculations it’s a lot cheaper to have them print it then buying the printer, buy the ink and buy the special paper. Another advantage is that you have much less chance messing up the print.

Here’s a table to summarize these choices:

	Black and White	Color	Photo Quality
Light printing needs	Inkjet	Inkjet Printer	Local store’s printing
Medium printing needs	Mono Laser Printer	Inkjet Printer	Local store’s printing
Heavy printing needs	Mono Laser Printer	Color Laser Printer	Professional print shop

Once you decided what type of printer you’d need then the next thing is the connectivity. Here you have 3 basic choices:

Local connection using USB
Network printing with wired connection
Network printing using wireless connection

If you have just one computer then obviously the first one is the choice. If you want several computers to be able to print to one computer then a network printer would be a good choice. I’ve written another article on when to get wireless printers: http://www.computerwizardindy.com/wireless-printers/

Next thing to consider is functionality: what functions do you want the printer to perform? Only printing? Printing/scanning/copying? Printing/scanning/copying/faxing?

And lastly, what brand to choose? The main brands are HP, Canon, Lexmark & Brother. Out of these I can recommend Canon and Lexmark. HP printers have good hardware but the software that comes with them is horrible – bloated, buggy. Brother: I just don’t have sufficient first hand experience with them to recommend them.

How to buy?

Here’s an advice if you want to save some money of a new printer: shop around. Printers are available in practically every store that sells electronic equipment (from Walmart to Best Buy). It’s worth looking around because each shop has some sale on one or more printers all the time so if you check 2 or 3 stores chances are that you’ll find the right kind of printer for you that is on sale.

Laszlo

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