Choosing a Printer

Okay, so you need a printer. It is tempting to just run over to the local technology center or office supply store and grab whatever is on sale, but you may want to stop a moment and consider a few things before whipping out the credit card. What follows is a list of qualifiers for narrowing down your choices and ultimately getting the best tool for the job.

1. What exactly are you using it for? There are a wide variety of printers for many uses, i.e. photos, documents (or reams of documents), cards, menus, etc. Look at your business needs and match your printer accordingly. I.e. If you have an accounting business, but want to print a color photo occasionally, buy a business printer and a reasonable photo printer; a photo printer makes a poor, high volume, document printer.

2. Types of available printers:
Laser - High speed, High Volume
Inkjet - Cheaper than laser cartridges, but slower and lower resolution than laser
All-in-One - Print, Copy and Fax (low volume, sometimes high maintenance)
Photo - Printing on photo paper (tends to be slow, cartridges can be pricey)
Dot Matrix - Old school forms printer (usually seen at medical and car rental companies)
Copier - Multi-function printer, copier (usually has other features like collating, scan to e-mail and PDF)
Plotter - Large format (typically pricey, used for banners, blueprints and drawings)

3. Typical features to consider (and are the necessary or just nice to have):
Duplexing - Printing on both sides of the paper. Good for saving the planet, printing manuscripts, contracts, etc.
Network - This allows the printer to be plugged into a network, avoiding the limitation of having to be near a PC (also avoids needing to share it from a PC and having the PC on all the time).
Wireless - Allows it to be added to the wireless network and it can be placed anywhere with an outlet.
Extra tray - How much are you printing? If you are printing reams of contracts or manuscripts how often do you want to add paper? An average laser printer will hold 250 sheets, an extra tray typically will hold an additional 500 sheets.
Size of the output tray - Related to the extra tray; if the output tray is shallow, close attention will be needed to mitigate overflow. There is nothing like printing a 98 page document only to find half of it mixed up on the floor.

4. Price: What is on sale, may not be the best price. Even though it seems like a great price, remember that printer manufacturers use the razor blade model. That means there is little or no margin on the cost of the printer, they may even sell it at a loss, but they will more than make it up in cartridge sales.

4a. Which brings us to cost of cartridges. Look at the models that fit your needs (use items above to whittle down to a select few) and go to CDW and Office Depot websites to compare replacement costs, taking into account their yield (how many pages on average). On similar model Brother and Samsung printers both had $65 cartridges, but the yields were 3000 and 6000; the first half as much for the same price. You can easily imagine the cost difference over a four year lifecycle; and these were both $99 printers.

5. Finally check reviews: Certainly don't spend three full days researching your $45 printer, but take fifteen minutes and go to BestBuy.com, Amazon.com, Epinions.com, OfficeDepot.com, etc. and see how many "stars" they have and what people are saying they did and didn't like. If you like to work in a very quiet environment and someone complains about how noisy your prospective purchase is, you have just saved time and aggravation.

6. In closing, don't be paralyzed by the myriad choices for printers and give a little thought to buying the right one the first time.