Know Your Printer’s Capacity
When most consumers purchase printers, they tend to look at printing quality, speed and various features it offers. Not many would have even bothered to find the maximum printing capacity of a printer before going for it. David Stone from PC Mag fame argues that buyers must heed importance towards printing capacity of a printer as well.
The author suggests that three key numbers – maximum duty cycle, recommended maximum per month and design lifetime must influence your decision in buying a new printer. All major printer manufacturers provide this information on the spec sheet. Recommended maximum pages per month is usually a computed component from the maximum duty cycle.
The maximum duty cycle gives us the capacity of a printer in terms of number of prints that can be printed in a month with no damage to the printer. If you hit the maximum duty cycle continuously monthly, most printers don’t last even a year, David says.
It is believed that you should pick a printer with a maximum duty cycle that’s at least three times the number of pages you print in an average month. This will ensure that the life of your printer will lengthen, but not by much.
Most importantly, as we have stressed previously, know your needs and then select the printer that fits your bill. Monthly duty cycle and design lifetime should also be one of the features that you look for on the box before handing over your credit card to the cashier.
About the author:
Abhinav has been blogging about printing and related technologies on CreativeCloud for several years. He is also a project manager for a large technology company.
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