Six questions to ask yourself before buying
Choosing the printer you need isn’t always straightforward. We’ll guide you through the key decisions you need to make
1 INKJET OR LASER?
For many years, the obvious choice for a busy office was an expensive laser printer, while the less-demanding home environment was better served with an inkjet. That isn’t necessarily the case any more, as inkjet printers have got faster and can more or less match the quality of a laser. Meanwhile, laser printers have become more compact and affordable, and no longer look out of place in a home office.
So, how to choose? If printing speed is crucial, particularly at volume, you almost certainly need to opt for a laser printer. As you’ll gather from our charts on p92, a fast laser printer can still leave even the speediest inkjet printer in the dust when it comes to churning out prints. This is particularly true when inkjets are printing at their highest quality settings; on the flip side, when inkjets are printing quickly, they’re not producing their best work.
If you’re printing a lot, you’ll also thank your laser printer for being able to produce a large quantity of pages without requiring you to constantly replace consumables.
If your printing demands are less voluminous and you want to print photos in high quality, an inkjet is a better bet. Although lasers are great at producing text and graphics, inkjet printers are still better at photos (as a rule), particularly if you print on coated paper designed for the job.
The last thing to consider is how often you print. Inkjet printers can get clogged up with dried ink if they aren’t used regularly. These blockages can be flushed out, but the process uses a significant amount of ink. So, if your printer is likely to be idle for long periods of time, you might be better off with a cheap laser.
At the opposite end of the scale, if you plan to print hundreds or even thousands of pages per month, opt for a device with a high duty cycle figure. This represents the maximum number of prints a device can produce if you really push it, so pick a printer with a duty cycle that exceeds your requirements.
2 CARTRIDGE OR TANK?
While it used to be the case that laser printers use toner cartridges and inkjet printers need inkjet cartridges, it’s no longer that straightforward. In this month’s Labs, we’ve got printers of both types that use tanks instead of cartridges to store their ink or toner. These tanks are replenished from a bottle and are more cost-efficient.
It also means less environmental waste, not least because the plastic bottles print far more pages than the average cartridge. The downside is that prints don’t tend to be as high quality as with cartridges.
3 DO I NEED AN MFP?
A lot of printers aren’t only used for printing. If you build a scanner into the same box, the resulting multifunction printer (MFP) can be used to print, scan and make copies of documents. Some even send and receive faxes, if you still require such a thing. Although MFPs tend to add to the overall bulk of a printer, the huge benefit is that you don’t need a
“A fast laser printer can still leave even the speediest inkjet printer in the dust when it comes to churning out prints”
separate scanner. You can also make copies without having to switch on your computer.
It’s worth remembering that scans from office-orientated MFPs can be disappointing – they’re useful for making copies of documents, but they aren’t designed for scanning your treasured photos. Scanners in devices aimed at home users are usually better suited to this. We’ll mention in our reviews of individual products when photo scans fall below par.
If you plump for an MFP, your next decision is whether to get one with an automatic document feeder (ADF). If you need to copy or scan a lot of documents, you’ll quickly tire of lifting the scanner lid and switching out the sheets after each page has been scanned. An ADF draws pages through the scanner for you, which can save a lot of time and effort.
WHAT CONNECTIONS 4 DO YOU NEED?
The vast majority of printers come with a USB port on the back, which you can use to directly connect to a single PC. All of the printers in this group test can be connected in this way and, if you only have one PC and want a simple life, it’s certainly the easiest way to go.
However, Wi-Fi is now almost as ubiquitous as USB. Connecting a printer to your existing wireless network is a simple one-off job on any printer that has a screen; if it doesn’t have a screen, you’ll need to connect it to a PC or phone first so the Wi-Fi settings can be copied across.
Once you’ve attached your printer to Wi-Fi, you can print on it from any other PCs and mobile devices that are connected to the same network. Most can print from iOS, iPadOS and Android devices, either directly or using free apps, and some can print directly from online services.
Some models come with Ethernet ports. If the devices you want to print from are on a wired network, this is a fast and effective way of connecting them all to a single printer.
A few printers and MFPs have extra interfaces you can print from, such as front-facing USB ports and memory card slots. These allow you to print documents and photos straight from USB storage or memory card, so are usually limited to devices that have screens, as you need to use these in order to explore the files and print the ones you want.
DO YOU WANT DOUBLE5 SIDED PRINTING?
Having lived with printers capable of printing on both sides of a sheet of paper for years now, we can’t quite imagine life without it. This trick is called duplexing, and it essentially prints on one side of a sheet, lets it dry, then sucks the paper back in and prints on the other side.
We were surprised how many of the printers in this group don’t have this function built-in so it’s worth looking out for. 6 MORE TRAYS, SIR?
One last thing that many MFPs have that’s well worth considering is two paper trays. Most inkjet printers have a manual feed you can slot paper in from the back. If you can keep a stock of plain A4 sheets in a tray at the bottom, it means much less faff when you want to print on different paper.