An Expert Guide To Choosing The Perfect Printer

If you run a business, then chances are you have an office filled with computers and other typical office equipment like photocopiers and water coolers! Once thing that many employees will do in the office on a daily basis is print stuff out. Those employees may print out all sorts of things, such as documents and letters, spreadsheets and charts, documents with text and image combined, or even just images and photographs.

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All businesses have different printing requirements, so if you are looking to get one or more printers for your office, and you aren’t sure where to start, then you need to continue reading this expert guide to choosing the perfect printer! Let’s face it; there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of different makes, models and types of printer available on the market, so you are going to want to make sure that you make the best choice!

What are your requirements?

The first thing that you will need to establish is what requirements your office has for printing. In a nutshell, those requirements can be categorised as text, image or combined printing.

There are many printers that have been designed specifically to cater to each of those requirements, so it is important that you don’t choose a printer designed for printing only text when you run a graphic design company and need to print high-quality images!

Secondly, you will need to determine what you want to print out to. Most printers let you print out on A4 paper or various envelope sizes, but you can get printers that let you print to A3, A2 and even A1 paper. Generally the bigger the paper size you want to print out to, the more expensive the printer will be, so you should make sure that you get a printer for the right size paper printouts you need.

Types of printer

There are several different types of printer available on the market, the most common ones are as follows:

• Inkjet – suitable for a combination of text, graphics and photographs, and offer monochrome and colour printing;

• Laser – suitable mainly for printing text or graphics in monochrome, with a higher quality than inkjet printers, although you can get colour laser printers too for images and photographs but inkjets do a better job at those sort of printouts;

• Dye-sublimation – suitable for high-quality image and photograph printing, not really suitable for text printing;

• Thermal – suitable for printing receipts, labels or barcodes.

Most offices typically have laser printers for monochrome text and low-resolution graphic printing, and inkjet printers for printing colour images and photographs at a high resolution.

Buying vs leasing

Many office environments tend to use mid-range to high-end printers because of their speed and printing resolution, but the problem with such printers is that they tend to cost a lot of money.

Although it can be tempting to buy the printers you need, you will also have to factor in the cost of replacement consumable items such as ink cartridges for inkjet printers and toners and drums for laser printers, and then there is the cost of getting those printers serviced so that they last as long as possible.

An increasingly attractive and more cost-effective solution is to lease the printers you need from companies such as Managed Print Services London. The added benefit to leasing printers is that, after a period of time, the company you lease from will swap your printers out for brand new models!