Which printer should you choose? Expert advice
Every time you choose a new gadget, office equipment or household appliances, first of all, you need to understand what its main purpose is. The same with a printer, before you buy it, you need to understand what it will print, how often and in what quantity.
A small color inkjet printer is ideal for home use. It is worth choosing an inexpensive model. This choice is optimal for regular printing of text with a small number of images. If you plan to print a lot of text, you should choose a model that installs both black and color cartridges. They are slightly more expensive but last longer and are very easy to replace and use. It should be noted that it is necessary to print on an inkjet printer at least once a month, if this is not done, the cartridges will become unusable and will have to be replaced.
Which printer to chooseIf the printer will be used in an office, it is optimal to choose a laser one: it prints much faster and allows you to print many times more sheets using one cartridge. Laser printers are ideal for printing diagrams, graphs, reports or presentations in the best quality and highest resolution possible.
Of course, laser printers are more expensive than inkjet printers, but consumables are relatively inexpensive. Quite often, cartridges for both cost the same. However, the resource of a cartridge for a laser printer is many times greater.
Compact photo printers can be classified in a separate category . They have the ability to use an additional palette of colors, with which you can preserve the beauty of the printed images in full.
Format and print speed
When choosing a printer, pay attention to what exactly you plan to print most often. Typically this is a standard A4 page used for printing documents. However, there are multifunctional devices that allow you to work with large formats, such as A3.
Color or black and white printer?
If you are sure that you only need to print text documents, and illustrations for them will be rare and black and white, you can opt for a monochrome model. Color printers are more expensive but have many more features. With their help, you can print photos, graphics, illustrations in color.
How to connect
Nowadays, almost all printers are connected to a computer via a USB port: 1.1, 2.0 or 3.0. The newest interface, 3.0, is much faster than older versions, but only the most recent models support it.
How much does a printed page cost?
The cost per page is calculated from the price of the cartridge and the cost of the paper. For calculation, take the maximum number of pages stated for your cartridge model. Divide the cost of a cartridge by this number and add the cost of one blank sheet of paper to get the cost of one print. A print here means a text page filled with no more than 5%.
In the case of color printing, the cost price is calculated a little differently. It can be obtained in the same way as for monochrome: dividing the cost of cartridges by the maximum number of pages. However, it should be borne in mind that there are usually more than one color cartridges. A printer with separate cartridges will have a lower cost price since you can replace the cartridges separately as you use them.
The resource of an inkjet printer cartridge is 200-300 pages, and a laser one from 2500 to 10 thousand pages.