How to buy the right printer

Picking the right printer can be tough, with so many variations in features, and individual printers with almost any possible combination of those variations available. Here are some questions to help you home in on both the right type of printer, and the right printer within that type. What Category of Printer Do You Need? The three most useful ways to categorize printers are by purpose (general or special), intended use (home or office), and technology. Define your needs by all three categories, and you're well on you way to finding the right printer. Most printers—including most inkjets that manufacturers market as photo printers—are general-purpose printers, meant for printing text, graphics, and photos. Special-purpose printers include portable printers, dedicated and near-dedicated photo printers, and label printers. If you're looking for a printer to print, say, photos, consider whether you want to print only photos or want a printer that can print other kinds of output also. General-purpose printers tend to focus on photos if they're intended for home use or on text if they're intended for the office. An increasing number of multifunction printers (MFPs) are meant for the dual role of home and office printer (particularly for home offices), but generally favor one role over the other. Consider how you plan to use the printer, and pick a printer designed for that role. The two most common technologies—laser and inkjet—increasingly overlap in capabilities, but there are still differences. The most important are that all lasers (and laser-class printers such as solid ink and LED-based printers) print higher-quality text than any inkjet, and almost any inkjet prints higher-quality photos than the overwhelming majority of lasers. Ask yourself whether text or photos are more important, and pick a technology accordingly. Do You Need a Single-Function Printer or an MFP? Consider whether you simply need to print or need something more. For a photo printer, for example, additional capability could be enough memory to store hundreds of photos, so you can bring the printer with you, show your photos, and then print them. (For more possibilities, see our Photo Printer Buying Guide.) For a general-purpose printer, additional capability means choosing an MFP, also known as an all-in-one or AIO. Additional functions include some combination of scanning, copying, faxing from your PC, standalone faxing, and scanning to e-mail. Office printers also typically add an automatic document feeder (ADF) to scan, copy, and/or fax multi-page documents and legal-size pages. Some MFPs offer additional printing options as well. Web-enabled printers, both home and office models, can connect directly to the Internet via WiFi to access and print out selected content without needing to work through a computer. Some models let you e-mail documents to the printer, which will then print them out. Do You Really Need Color? For a home printer, you probably need color, but for an office printer, if you never print anything but letters and monochrome documents, there's no reason to spend money on color. Keep in mind, however, that many color lasers can print at high enough quality to print your own advertising handouts and trifold brochures, which could save you money compared with printing small quantities at your local print shop. How Big a Printer Are You Comfortable With? Be sure to look into the printer's size. Even some home printers can be uncomfortably large to share a desk with, and even a printer with a small footprint can be tall enough to feel like it's towering over you. How Are You Going to Connect? In addition to a USB port, most office printers and an increasing number of home printers include Ethernet ports, so you can share the printer easily. Many also include WiFi capability. Even if they don't, keep in mind that if you have a wireless access point on your network, you can print wirelessly to any printer on that network, whether the printer itself offers a wireless connection or not. What Level of Output Quality Do You Need? Printers vary significantly in output quality. Check out text, graphics, and photos separately, since high quality for one kind of output doesn't necessarily mean high quality for the others. How Much Speed Do You Need? If almost everything you print is one or two pages, you probably don't need a fast printer. If you print a lot of longer documents, speed is more important, which means you probably want a laser printer. As a rule, laser printers will be close to their claimed speeds for text documents, which don't need much processing time. Inkjets often claim faster speeds than more expensive lasers, but very seldom live up to the claims. How Much Do You Print? If you print only a few pages a day, you don't have to worry about how much a printer is designed to print—as defined by its recommended (not maximum) monthly duty cycle. If you print enough for the duty cycle to matter, however, don't buy a printer that doesn't include that information in its specifications. Figure out how much you print by how often you buy paper and in what amounts. Then pick a printer designed to print at least that much. (For more details on duty cycle, take a look at our Office Printers Buying Guide.) Also consider minimum and maximum paper size and whether you need a duplexer to print on both sides of the page. For input capacity, a useful rule of thumb is to get enough capacity so you should need to add paper no more than once a week. How Much Does It Cost? Finally, be sure to check out the total cost of ownership. Most manufacturers will tell you the cost per page, and many give a cost per photo. To get the total cost of ownership, calculate the cost per year for each kind of output (monochrome, color document, photo) by multiplying the cost per page for that kind of output by the number of those pages you print per year. Add the three amounts together to get the total cost per year. Then multiply that by the number of years you expect to own the printer, and add the initial cost of the printer. Compare the total cost of ownership figures between printers to find out which printer will be cheapest in the long run. From/pcmag