6 THINGS TO LOOK FOR WHEN BUYING A PRINTER
Not everyone, or every business needs the same features from their printer – but there are areas everyone should examine
1 FORM FACTOR
Forget inkjet versus laser; what matters these days is whether your printer is built for home or business. This isn’t merely a question of features – you’ll find printers designed for home with scanners and auto-document feeders – but the home models will generally be more compact and lightweight, while the office models will be larger, heavier and more robust.
Home printers tend to have extra capabilities for handling photo media, while the office models are designed to handle jobs at scale. They’ll have larger paper cassettes or input trays, so you don’t need to keep refilling, and they’ll have more space in the output tray so that larger jobs can pile up without collapsing onto the floor. They’ll often be noisier, but they’ll also be designed for lower running costs.
And running costs are the key. You can often get away with buying, say, a consumer laptop and using it within your business, but get a home inkjet to do the same and you’ll be looking at downtime and exorbitant ink costs. If you have some serious work to do, an office printer will last longer and do it for less.
2 PRINT QUALITY
Print quality is less important than it used to be; every printer on test produces passable results. However, you still need to decide upon your priorities before you buy. Office printers can and do produce good photo prints, but they’re focused on delivering crisp black text and clean, vibrant business graphics. More advanced home printers can now produce impressive text, but they won’t do it at the speeds of office models. We’ve tested each of these printers on their text, business graphics and photo quality, and it’s hard to find a model that does all three well at a good speed. You’ll have to compromise somewhere. The only question is, where?
3 SPEED
Print times are an issue for every printer, if only because it’s getting harder in an on-demand world to wait five minutes for a photo to print. However, it matters more in a business context, and even more when a printer is being shared. Do you really want to be late to a client meeting because your colleague has set ten copies of a 26-page report to print? Manufacturers will often talk in terms of pages per minute (ppm), with the printers here ranging from 10ppm to 35ppm in black-andwhite or 5ppm to 30ppm in colour. However, this is only half the story. Not only are the claimed speeds often best-case-scenario figures, but there’s a huge variation in terms of how long you’ll wait for the first page to emerge.
4 CONNECTIVITY
While it’s still possible to buy a USB-only printer, most of us now expect them to sit within our home or office network and print from a variety of PCs and mobile devices. In the home and – increasingly – the small office, wireless connectivity is a must. In larger offices, a wired network is still seen as being easier to configure, more stable and more secure. Some printers make setting up either connection almost painfree, while others still seem hellbent on dragging you through a configuration nightmare, meaning you should make sure you find one
“Do you really want to be late to a client meeting because your colleague has set ten copies of a 26-page report to print?”
that matches your required level of control and expertise.
What’s more, printers are increasingly designed to work with mobile devices, either through support for standards such as AirPrint on iOS and Mopria on Android, or through manufacturer-developed apps and Google Cloud Print. The latter is now the standard for printing remotely across the internet, but manufacturers will have their own, often more businessfocused services as well.
5 COST-SAVING FEATURES
For years, many inkjets have run on a razors/blades business model, where the printer itself is cheap but you spend a fortune on supplies. While office lasers and inkjets make the balance between purchase costs and ongoing expense a little more equitable, manufacturers still have their eye on squeezing you longterm. That’s why it’s important to keep a close eye on the obvious running costs – the cost-per-page in terms of ink or toner – but also other features that could save you or your business money over time.
Are there eco-print settings? How do these affect quality? Can you set the printer to duplex so that it prints double-sided, preferably by default? Does the printer use a lot of power, or is it optimised to use less and make effective use of sleep modes? Are there pull-printing features, which require the person printing to authenticate their print job at the printer? These can save money wasted on unwanted prints. These aren’t the features that make headlines, but you’ll end up being thankful for anything that reduces running costs as the printers’ working life goes on.
6 WORKFLOW FEATURES
Scanning and copying capabilities are now ubiquitous in the home printer market; unless you’re buying a specialist photo printer, they’re pretty much a given. Things aren’t quite so simple in the office market, where you may still pay a price premium, so it’s really a question of how they’ll fit into your company workflow. Will having an all-in-one enable you to ditch a standalone copier? Are there ways to make your business more efficient by, say, digitising forms or records, or removing some of the paperwork from your processes? Think about how you can use these features and they become a bonus. Otherwise, they might not be worth the extra.