Inkjet or laser? Black-and-white or colour? There can be many factors to consider when purchasing or upgrading your printer to make sure it suits your business requirements and budget.
We looked at some important points you need to ask yourself before making a purchase.
Inkjet or Laser printer?
With the price between Inkjet and Laser printers narrowing over recent years, it’s important to look at your printing requirement and budget.
Inkjet printing works by depositing dots of coloured ink on the page from the cartridges and are mostly used for regular and low volume printing as the ink cartridges have a low yield (how many pages it prints).
Laser printers use toner powder which is fused to the page to create the image. They are durable and ideal for high volume printing. The toner cartridges are more expensive to purchase but produce a higher printing yield so don’t need to be replaced as frequently. Making them a cheaper option in the long run.
Colour or B&W
With printer needs being business specific, you will need to consider the nature of your business and what type of documents you will be printing. Do you need to be able to print in colour or just black and white?
If your daily printing text-based documents such as invoices, then a monochrome printer would be well suited, however if you have the occasional requirement to print in colour then it would be worth investing in a colour machine.
Print speed and machine functions
The print speed refers to the speed the printer can print a page of text in black ink per minute. These range from 13 ppm (pages per minute) to 60ppm. The required print speed depends on the planned usage and how many people the printer will be serving. If you have high print volumes, it’s recommended to go with a higher print speed to keep up with demand.
Another big deciding factor is, do you solely print in A4 or do you have the requirement to print on A3? If you are looking for flexibility, an A3 printer will provides this as it prints both A3 and A4 sized paper.
If you’ve got a high requirement for scanning or faxing documents, you may want to consider a multifunction printer that can perform all these tasks. Opting for a multifunctional device can often help businesses streamline tasks, increase productivity and potentially decrease costs.
Connectivity and IT Infrastructure
The key type of connectivity you should look for is Ethernet, as this will allow you to plug the printer into your network router or perhaps you require wireless printing to allow printing from mobile devices and would therefore need to opt for a machine with a wireless function.
Another key factor to consider is your business IT Infrastructure. As you will need to make sure that the printer supports all the devices that require access in your office, for example MAC or Windows.
Office space
It’s important to consider the location of your printer and where the device is going to sit within the room to avoid purchasing a printer that takes up too much space! Also, you will need to calculate how many people the printer will serve in order to meet the demands of daily operations, for example a medium sized office will require a printer with a higher print per minute output and additional paper cassettes to increase the volume of paper housed.
