Choose the Right Printer

When it comes time to add a new printer to your computer system, these days there are two clear choices: inkjet printers and laser printers. Both types of printers produce about the same quality text and graphics, but they do it in different ways. Let’s look at the two types:

Inkjet Printers

• Inkjet printers work by spraying tiny droplets of ink through the printhead onto the page. (This means that inkjet print is always going to be slightly fuzzier than laser print because the ink has a chance to seep into the paper.)
• Inkjet come in two types. Thermal inkjet printers, from manufacturers like Canon and Lexmark, heat the ink until it turns to bubbles that are forced through the printhead. (Hence the name of Canon’s BubbleJet line.) Epson’s piezo inkjet printers use the vibrations of an electrified piezo crystal to force ink onto the page. In practice, it’s hard to tell the difference between the two techniques on the printed page.
• Inkjet printers are frequently quite inexpensive, especially when you take advantage of sales, rebates, and special offers. When you buy a low-cost inkjet printer, though, make sure it comes with both color and black print cartridges, or you’ll find yourself having to pay an additional $40 to $80 before you can print anything. Sometimes you get lucky — I once bought a Lexmark Z515 for $29 at Wal-Mart, and that included both print cartridges!
• Inkjet cartridges are expensive and produce documents with a very high cost-per-page. Unfortunately, trying to lower that cost-per-page by refilling your used cartridges or buying third-party refills yields mixed results because cartridges deteriorate quickly upon refilling. Sadly, it sometimes costs less to buy an entirely new printer with print cartridges included than it does to buy new cartridges for the printer you already have.
• Even with their high cost-per-page, inkjet printers are still best for light to medium-duty color printing because color laser printing is even more expensive. There are several categories of color inkjet printers depending on the type of color printing you want to do. Basic inkjet printers are good for printing documents with black and color on the same page (such as letters or reports with color photographs or charts). Photo inkjet printers are designed for printing photographs using special ink on coated paper; they come in snapshot and full-page sizes. Multifunction inkjet printers combine color printing with a color copier, and sometimes a fax machine and a telephone. And some companies even make portable inkjet printers that are small enough to carry around with you as you travel.

Laser Printers:

• Laser printers work by charging a drum with static electricity and then using a laser to reverse the electrical charge wherever you want print to appear on the page. Toner sticks to the reverse charges on the drum, so when the printer passes the paper over the drum, the toner is transfered and heat-fused into place. This is why laser print is slightly sharper than inkjet print — the toner is actually fused onto the paper, not absorbed into it.
• Instead of a laser, some printers use an array of light emitting diodes (LED’s) to reverse the charge on the drum. Even though no laser is involved, these printers are still generally referred to as laser printers.
• Laser printers are expensive, and sometimes they don’t come with toner, which makes them even more expensive. Occasionally you can find them at a good price on sale or with a rebate, such as the excellent HP LaserJet 1020 that I bought at Staples recently for $100 (toner cartridge included!). Most laser printers are very sturdy pieces of equipment, though, so your investment should last a long time.
• Although toner cartridges are expensive, they usually last from 1,500 to 6,000 pages (depending on manufacturer and printer model), which means that their cost-per-page is almost always less than that of inkjet printers. The downside, of course, is that buying a toner cartridge requires a bigger outlay of money at one time (usually between $70 and $100).
• Color laser printers are still expensive, and so are their toner cartridges — especially when you consider that a color laser printer needs between four and seven toner cartridges to print in color. Fortunately, you only need to replace each color toner cartridge as it runs out, unlike inkjet printers where you usually have to replace all the colors at the same time, even if only one color is empty. Still, color laser printing is not yet at the point where it can challenge color inkjets for the home market.

So which printer is right for you? Keep these points in mind:

• If spending only a little money at a time is important to you, buy an inkjet printer. Your cost-per-page will be high, but you will only have to pay $50 to $100 for the printer and then $30 to $40 at a time as printer cartridges run out. If you are willing to deal with the hassles of refill kits, you can reduce those costs a little more.
• If low cost-per-page is important to you, buy a laser printer. Your initial expenditures will be more (several hundred for the printer, and another $70 to $100 each time the toner cartridge runs out), but your cost-per-page will be low — sometimes as low as two or three cents per page.
• If you want to print in color, buy a color inkjet printer — either a basic model or a photo printer, depending on your needs. The printer probably won’t cost much, but your print-outs will, especially if you’re printing photographs with photo ink on special coated photo paper. Still, the investment will be a lot less than the hundreds (possibly thousands) that it would take to buy and maintain a color laser printer.
• If you want to print in high volume (over 200 pages a month), buy a laser printer. Inkjet printers just aren’t made for high volume printing, and their ink cartridges don’t hold a lot of ink, which means that an inkjet printer will probably run out of ink in the middle of a large print run. Laser printer toner cartridges will last for thousands of pages.

Whichever type of printer you decide to buy, be sure to visit your local computer center first to see the models they have on display. You’ll want to know how they are constucted, what their ink or toner cartridges look like, how big a paper tray they have, what the paper paths are like, and so on. You’ll want to know as much as possible before you buy, because with any luck you’ll be using the printer you choose for a long time.

Filed Under Windows How-To's