Purchasing a printer can be a complicated business, there are more shapes, sizes and types of printers open to the home and small company user than ever before. Printers also have become specialised because of their intended purpose.
It is no more an incident of "a printer is really a 3d printers" ;.Printers are now actually made to be good in a certain area rather than "Jack-of-all trades", which will do everything.
An often overlooked issue, is ab muscles serious consideration of cost of ownership, which is all about of simply how much it will definitely cost to keep your printer running (see below). So making that decision which printer to choose can be a seriously arduous task, particularly if you are keen to buy a printer that is not just affordable to buy but also inexpensive to run.
So this is actually the information that you'll require to understand and consider, but no one lets you know! We've not expanded which printer is the better at any given time because models constantly change and you can find that information in virtually any current glossy PC magazine off the shelf. Instead, here you will see the great, bad and ugly bits from the several types of printers available so you possibly can make an educated decision yourself.
Inkjet Technology
Inkjet printers form images by spraying tiny droplets of liquid ink onto paper. The size and precision of the dots of ink and the sort and quality of the ink itself govern how good the print quality is. A good inkjet printer can produce very near photo-quality images using specialist photo coated paper. In general you will find two types of inkjet printers, individuals with the printhead built in to the printer like Epson, Brother etc and those where the printhead is really on the ink cartridge like HP and Lexmark. There are many arguments for and against both technologies, in our experience we are finding both to be excellent, the major difference is apparently that the price of managing a printer using the "printhead" type ink cartridge is normally higher.
Inkjet ink is specially formulated for specific printer models and their purpose, much technology is active in the development of the inks to boost print quality, longevity, drying speeds and printing speeds etc. Most inkjet ink is produced using dye based ink which can flow easily through the tiny nozzles of the printhead, this sort of ink is good for photos and colour shades but not good for longevity or solid vibrant colour, think of it like a water colour painting. Lately pigment ink technology has advanced considerably to enable use in inkjet printing. Previously ink pigments were too large and would block up the nozzles. This sort of ink is good for solid colours and longevity, think of it like a gas painting.
Manufacturers like Epson, HP and Jet Tec are now actually increasingly using a fusion of dye based and pigmented inks to generate superb quality photo printing with vibrant colours and longevity too.
Inkjet printers use anything between two and eight ink cartridges to accomplish their job. Generally the entry-level machines use two cartridges, good all round machines use four and specialist photo printers use six or more. The two cartridge system works fine though can be a bit wasteful on the colour ink, so choose a four-cartridge system where possible particularly if you do colour printing. The six or more cartridge systems produce outstanding photos, but could be costly and a pain to keep changing cartridges (printer does not work if anyone cartridge is empty).
Inkjet printers are the very best solution for most of us and usually are probably the most economical way to print - unless you are printing large volumes.
Portable Inkjet Printers
These printers are small, lightweight and ideal for people on the move. Even though the printing of top quality photographs is normally beyond this sort of printer, basic colour printing is of high quality and the caliber of text print is mainly outstanding considering how big is these tiny portable A4 printers. These printers are not suited to high volume printing.
Inkjet Printers
The Inkjet Printer is probably the most commonly used kind of printer among home and small company users. With excellent all round printing capabilities, from black & white text print and good colour prints through to very hi-resolution, top quality photographs using Inkjet Photo Printers. Inkjet printers are available from cheap entry level to high-end business use machines and can print from photo size prints to massive A2 and bigger sizes, you will find models for occasional use and others for high volume print jobs too. One of the many advantages of Inkjet printers is that you should use a wide variety of media to print on, including standard paper, photo paper, card, t-shirt transfers, canvas, projector film etc, achieving different looks and textures for your prints and print for different purposes. Most Inkjet printers are USB connections and not suited to networks, although models will also be available for networks and with parallel connections.
Multi-Function Inkjet Printers
Multi-Function Inkjet Printers have been built to meet up the wants of home offices and small businesses. These excellent value machines provide multiple solutions in one compact and simple to use machine i.e. printing, scanning, copying and some likewise have built-in fax machines too. Not merely are these machines great for saving space on your own desk, but they are also excellent for printing too using the same technology as standard inkjet printers. The only thing you should be conscious of is that you can only use one function at the same time and if anything goes wrong having an "All-in-one" machine, you could lose the all of the functions simultaneously!
Laser Printers
Laser printers work in an identical way to photocopiers, except they work with a laser instead of a brilliant light to scan with. They work by creating an electrostatic image of the page onto a charged photoreceptor, which often attracts toner in the shape of an electrostatic charge. Toner could be the material used to really make the image (as ink is in a inkjet printer) and is really a very fine powder, so laser printers use toner cartridges instead of ink cartridges.
Laser Printers have traditionally been the very best printing solution for heavy office users because they make a high quality black text finish and offer relatively low running costs. However, laser printers have advanced a good deal recently and their prices have steadily dropped, consequently there are now compact laser printers, multi-function and colour laser printers all at very affordable prices. Laser printers sound right if you need to accomplish plenty of top quality black or colour prints, not photos. The great thing about a colour laser printer is that they can print a good quality colour image on standard copier paper, so you don't need to use expensive photo paper for big jobs. Do check the costs of the consumables before you buy the printer as these can be very expensive for colour laser printers.
Laser printers are the very best solution for those who are printing in large volumes, that is, in 100's of pages at the same time or 1000's of pages per month. Colour lasers also take a serious while to warm up, so are not ideal for printing single pages.
Solid Ink Printers
Solid ink printers use solid wax ink sticks in a "phase-change" process, they work by liquefying wax ink sticks into reservoirs and then squirting the ink onto a transport drum from where it's cold-fused onto the paper within a pass. Solid ink printers are marketed almost exclusively by Tektronix / Xerox and are directed at larger businesses and high volume colour printing.
Solid ink printers used to be cheaper to get than similarly specified colour lasers and fairly economical to operate owing to a low component usage, today it's certainly not any cheaper than a colour laser printer. Output quality is good but generally not as effective as the very best colour lasers for text and graphics or the very best inkjets for photographs. Print speeds are not as fast since many colour lasers.
Dye-Sublimation Printers
Dye-Sublimation printers use heat and solid colour dyes to create lab-quality photographic images. Dye-Sub printers contain a roll of transparent film composed of page-sized panels of colour, with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black dye embedded in the film. Print head heating elements vaporize the inks, which stick to a specially coated paper, while the ink cools it re-solidifies on the paper. Colour intensity is controlled by precise variations in temperature.
Dye-sublimation printers lay down color in continuous tones one color at the same time instead of dots of ink such as an inkjet, because the colour is absorbed in to the paper rather than sitting at first glance, the output is more photo-realistic, stronger and less susceptible to fading than other ink technologies.
The downside of Dye-Sub printers is that they're generally higher priced to buy and run, usually limited by photo sized prints only and can only just print onto one kind of specialised paper in addition to being quite slow to print.
Dye-Sublimation printers are best for individuals who want to link up their digital camera to an intention built printer and print out the best quality photos in the home without fuss.
Dot Matrix Printers
Dot matrix printers are relatively old fashioned technology today with low quality print, slow and very noisy output. This sort of printer is no more used unless you wish to generate invoices using the continuous paper with holes on both sides. The great thing is that they're very cheap to operate!
Cost of Ownership
Many printers today are very cheap to buy, but people are occasionally shocked to find the price of replacing the consumables (ink or laser cartridges, imaging drums, fuser, oils, specialist papers etc). The expense of replacing the ink can sometimes cost more compared to printer itself! That is one of the most commonly overlooked factors when printers are reviewed and yet one of the main what to consider before handing over your hard earned cash. Tests run in 2003 by Which? magazine famously compared the price of HP's ink with vintage 1985 Dom Perignon.
A Sheffield City Council report directed at helping schools decide on the best-value printers to buy, calculated total cost of ownership over the duration of a printer (not sure just how long that is!). Adding up all of the running costs, ink or toner, paper, maintenance and even electricity, SCC exercised a colour inkjet costs approx 38p per page to operate compared to a colour laser which costs approx 7p per page. Sheffield City Council advised its schools that when they printed significantly more than three colour pages per day (assuming a 40-week academic year) they will obtain a laser 3d printers.
