The Process of Choosing the Right Printer

Finding an ideal printer for your activities can never be an assailable job. With tons of choices in the air from multiple major manufacturers, choosing the one that fits the bill will definitely take some research and analysis before the decision is made.

We recount a story that was posted by Nigel Harris and highlight certain things to look for in a printer before the purchase.

The author wanted to replace his old printer that was used to print invoices mainly. His requirements were simple: print volume was moderate, networking not required and wanted excellent quality. The printer that can fulfill all these requirements is a laser printer in the most generic sense and a monochrome would do as colour printing is not absolute necessary.

In effect, it is important for us to know what the features that we need to look for are. Once we have those jotted down, the process of finding an ideal printer would become simpler, relatively at least.

According to Nigel, laser printers come in four flavours:

1. Very basic - cheapest, but too flimsy for my use.
2. Desktop printers, in a range of prices to reflect speed and print quality.
3. Networked printers - ideal if you share printers as these can be plugged into a spare network point and don’t need to run off a PC. You can share another person’s local printer, but their computer needs to be switched on and logged on to the network, so if they are not in you could be stuck.
4. Workgroup printers - these are the big networked versions, designed for high volumes, so they tend to have huge paper trays, often several so that plain paper and letterheads can always be on tap. They have fast print speeds and are expensive.

Categorizing printers in a similar fashion should help you narrow down on your choices.

HP has an automated tool on their website called the Help Me Choose a Printer that helps users pick an appropriate HP printer for their needs. We do not think that a third party website exists that hosts such a tool that can choose an ideal printer based on our requirements.

To conclude the story of Nigel Harris, he finally decided to buy a HP P2015 monochrome laser printer. The printer cost was £150 and rough calculations estimated that each print would cost him just over a penny.

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