Do I need a laser printer or an inkjet printer?
In the early days, the difference between laser printers and inkjet printers were huge which has been gradually lessened these days to a level where it is sometimes complicated to set apart these two. Laser printers were preferred because of its fast and high quality prints but the quality of the inkjet printers have been improved close to the quality of a laser printer at remarkably lower price. You can determine whether a laser printer or an inkjet printer would be suitable for you by following the general rule “the lower the cost of the printer, the more costly is the running expense”. However, this could depend on the quantity of the print you are going to make.
A simple example can make things clear about an inkjet printer. Let’s consider a Canon i320 color bubble jet printer that usually costs around £30 and additional £10 for every time you change the cartridge that can produce around 170 pages. Now, if you print only 7 pages a day, the total number would be 2100 pages over the year, which means you have to spend more than 4 times the price of the printer for a year as maintenance expense. Moreover, as a multifunctional printer, inkjets are not recommended at all when you need large volume print outs like label printing considering the slow print rate, average print quality and encountering frequent cartridge error messages.
A recent study has shown that last year around 1.85 million laser printers were sold, having a substantial growth in comparison with the previous year. A massive number of offices are using laser printers, however, they are not recommended only if you are going to use it as a photo printer or for printing fliers or broachers in huge volume consistently. By using the duplex unit, a brochure or leaflet printer can print back to back which is particularly a useful feature. Besides, adding a paper drawer and assigning different paper trays for different prints can optimize the cost of operation and in turns decrease the printer errors. Moreover, adding an Ethernet with a laser printer will allow users to avail it in a network.
Therefore, before buying a printer, keep all these constraints under consideration to ensure that your invest wouldn’t result a big mess for your business.
