Color quality, capabilities and speed
Printing a quick recipe for Wednesday night’s taco night is a bit different than printing quality documents for an upcoming pitch meeting. There are several important differences between printers meant for everyday home use and those meant for the office.
TechRadar Pro compiled these essential buying tips in order help enterprise customers make well-informed decisions.
12 best inkjet and laser printers
Color quality
All printers are not alike. If you are solely printing letters and other monochromatic documents, there is probably little reason to consider a color printer. However, if you are printing high-quality business pitches, advertising flyers or other documents that require a strong visual display, then a color printer can save your business time and money. Invest in a printer that features solid output quality, and above-par graphics.
Multi-function capabilities
In addition to a printer, is your business also looking to purchase new office input or output devices, such as copiers, scanners, or fax machines? If so, consider a multi-function device to consolidate space and expense. Multi-function devices save desk space and benefit from having a single technical-support source for handling multiple functions. Most multi-function devices cost less than $1000, which proves to be a budget saver opposed to shopping for several individual machines.
Speed
Are you printing hundreds of pages at a time? If so, speed should be a top priority when purchasing your business printer. Judge speed carefully. It is inaccurate to compare claimed speeds for inkjets with claimed speeds for lasers. Laser printers will be close to their claimed speeds for text documents, which don’t need much processing time. Inkjets may claim faster speeds than more expensive lasers, but sometimes fail to live up to expectations.
Print speeds depend on how complex documents are and how many pages are to be printed. A 50 page text-only word document will probably print faster than a 100-megapixel photo printed on an A4 sheet. Printers used to rely a lot on the host computer for compute and memory resources but this has dramatically changed over the past few years. Some now integrate the same base hardware as a smartphone and can rapidly process even large image files.
Price, connections and where to buy
Price
While most printer vendors will calculate the cost per page, focus your calculations on the total cost of ownership. To compute the total cost of ownership, multiply the cost per page by the number of pages you print per year, then multiply that figure by the number of years that you expect to own the printer, and then add in the initial cost of the printer. Printers can range from a $99 expense up to more than $1,000 before you calculate energy consumption.
Some printers can use a whopping 1KW when in use; that’s about $100 per year. So, including energy consumption, the formula for the TCO for a printer’s lifetime would approximately be:
TCO (p) = COP + AEC + initial cost of printer
Average electricity costs (AEC) = ((monthly expected amount of printed pages * number of months you expect to use the printer) / (60 *average print speed in PPM)) * power consumption in use in kW* average cost of electricity.
Cost of print (COP) = ((av. cost per printed page + cost of sheet) * monthly expected amount of printed pages * number of months you expect to use the printer)/100
Arguably, a lower total cost of ownership is highly desirable if you’re looking for the printer that will cost you the cheapest in the long run. As a side note, cheap printers usually carry higher consumable costs (which often translates into a much higher TCO).
One vendor has also introduced a subscription-type print service that charges you on how many pages you print, not on what type of pictures you print while offering some level of flexibility; your ink cartridges are even automatically shipped. Works best if you plan to print a lot of photos.
Paper size
Generally speaking, the most common sizes are letter size in the US and A4 for the rest of the world. However, it is worth considering an A3 printer, especially if you plan to print brochures or posters. They’re not significantly more expensive than their A4 counterparts but the cost per page is likely to be higher if you intend to print a lot on A3. The cost of a blank sheet of A3 is about thrice that of an A4 one.
Printer connections
All printers can connect using the ubiquitous USB port (the square one, in v2 mode) with mainstream models (and above) offering Ethernet ports. Wireless connectivity (either via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) is also catching up with Wi-Fi direct being an increasingly popular option. Printers are also catching up with the whole cloud paradigm as well with many recent models compatible with cloud-based solutions (that enable print from anywhere and any devices) such as Google Cloud Print. Also consider whether you want one printer to be connected to an existing network to service more than one computer (e.g. in an office). Peripherals like a print server can be a helpful addition to your setup. Last, do consider that some printers can print direct from an attached storage (memory card, USB drive or even portable hard drive).
Where to buy it
Buying in a brick-and-mortar store like Staples means that you can see, touch, feel and often get a print out to check the quality. Buying on the web however can be cheaper and vendors very often have marketing schemes that only work online like discount codes, freebies, clearance sales or one-off promotions.
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in depth: What to consider when purchasing a business printer