Buying a Printer
What to look for in a printer
If you're in the market for a new printer, it's worth taking time to think about just why you need one and which one is best for you. Different types have different strengths and weaknesses so let's see what's what.
Laser, Inkjet or Combo?
Most people will probably buy an inkjet printer. Inkjets are a good choice for general duties. They can be very cheap - more on that later. They can also produce very good results. However, there are a few things to note. Some printers excel at printing photos but are less good at printing plain text such as letters or other documents. Equally, others produce great text but less impressive photos. You need to decide where your emphasis lies before deciding which model to go for. The only real way to see which one's are better suited for a given type of print is to read reviews or to look around the net to see what others have to say. Some shops can also supply pre-printed examples from different printers that you can take away to compare.
Laser printers generally cost a little more and unless you are talking serious money, are only capable of printing plain old black. Colour laser printers exist but cost a lot more. Where colour printers shine is on heavy workloads or oddly enough low workloads. Inkjet printers generally have a problem in that they need to be used at least once every few weeks to prevent the ink in the print heads starting to dry. Some brands are worse than others and a quick look around the net gives the impression that Epson's suffer worse than most in this area. If you rarely need to print, a cheap laser printer costing around £150 would be the best bet as it could sit there for a year in between prints and not mind. Laser printers are also good at high volume work as they can print plain text much faster than most inkjets.
Finally, you might want to consider combo printers which combine an inkjet or laser printer with a scanner and/or a fax machine to become an all singing all dancing peripheral. The big advantage here is a big space saving - a printer, scanner and fax machine would take up much more desk space than a single machine performing all three functions. The downside is that if any part fails (out side of the guarantee), you may end up losing fax, printer and scanner all at once whereas separate components would only lose the item that failed.
Cheap Printer, Costly Consumables
One thing you may notice is that as a rule, the cheaper the printer, the more costly the consumables. As an example, a colleague has a printer that cost £60 but a full set of ink cartridges is nearly £40. On the other hand, my printer cost £190 but I can get a complete set of branded consumables for half that. The manufacturers make their money on the ink and paper, not the printer so be sure to look at the running costs as well as the purchase costs. Another thing to look out for with inkjets is that some have a single colour cartridge so if cyan runs out early, you end up throwing away lots of blue and magenta. More upmarket printers have separate cartridges for each colour so you only throw away the colour that has run out - a big saving in the long term.
Laser printers tend to be cheaper per page than inkjets for normal document printing. There are firms that sell 'green' cartridges i.e. ones which have been refilled with toner. This saves money and is also better for the environment as some of the stuff in toner cartridges can be pretty nasty. You'll also find that a toner cartridge for a laser printer will print a lot more pages before it needs replacing.
Other Features
Other features you might want to look out for are the ability to print right to the edge of the paper - useful for photos, especially larger ones. Some printers can take rolls of paper as well as individual sheets. If you are printing photos, this can be a boon - simply load a roll, press go and watch your photos print one after the other, much like at Boots!
Another area of potential interest is the printer driver. This is the program that the PC uses to do the actual printing. Some just send the output to the printer but others have more esoteric extras. You might be able to automatically balance the colour of a digital photo, resize it or even adjust individual colours. Even after you've bought a printer, it's worth keeping your printer driver up to date via the manufacturers web site as they often improve upon whatever was supplied when you first bought the printer.
Paper
When it comes to getting the best results, especially with inkjets, choosing the right paper is of paramount importance. Manufacturers put a lot of effort in to getting superb results from their printers and the only way to get the best quality is to use the manufacturers own ink and paper. For photos this is a must. Try putting Hewlett Packard photo paper in an Epson then try it with Epson's own photo paper. No contest. Expect to pay a premium for this but if you want your precious photos to look their best, it's a must. For normal text printing you can usually get away with any old inkjet paper. Printing graphs and charts probably warrants something slightly better.
Laser printers are generally happy with whatever you throw at them although some really cheap brands can get stuck or cause feed problems but a bit of trial and error will soon help you sort out which paper works best.
Whichever paper you use, you must remember to tell the printer which sort is loaded by using the Print Properties screen in whatever program you are printing from.
