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Remember when computers were supposed to herald the era of the paperless office? Forget it. For all the improvements in electronic communication over the past decade, we're still using paper. One reason is today's printers. They make it remarkably easy to produce beautiful letters, reports, graphs, spreadsheets, party invitations, fliers, business cards, photographs and advertisements. Partnered with a word processor, desktop publishing software or a capable graphics program, your printer can turn out documents that would have required a professional only a few years ago.
There are three basic types of printers designed for home and small-business use, plus a couple of exotic printer technologies used mainly by graphics professionals.
A better name for these would be "page printers" because they produce a full page at a time using office photocopier technology. Instead of copying an existing image, they use a controlled laser beam or light-emitting diode to create an image on a light-sensitive drum. This image is then transferred to paper by fusing toner to the page at a high temperature.
Laser printers cost anywhere from $250 to $10,000. More money will get you a faster printer, better print quality, improved graphics capabilities and a heavier duty cycle.
Advantages of laser printers:
Printing speed. Inexpensive laser printers generally produce four pages per minute. Heavy-duty printers designed for office networks can produce as many as 24 pages per minute. There are lots of choices in between, but you'll generally pay more for a faster printer.
Image quality. Even low-end laser printers can produce sharp text and graphics that are great for business applications. High-end, specialty laser printers produce output that rivals the film-based imagesetters used by magazine and newspaper publishers.
Disadvantages of laser printers:
No affordable color. Color laser printers cost $3,500 and up -- too much for anyone who's not a serious professional. If you buy a color laser printer, you'll get color quality that's as good as or better than the best ink jets but not quite as good as high-end specialty color printers. If you absolutely need color but don't have a lot of money to spend, consider an ink jet.
Ink jet printers produce images by squirting ink through tiny nozzles in a print head that passes over the page a line at a time. Until a few years ago, ink jet quality was too spotty for business use, but now they're almost as good as laser printers for correspondence and can reproduce color images with near-photographic quality. As a result, they're riding a surge of popularity.
Monochrome ink jets are available for as little as $25. Color ink jets start at about $35 and go up to about $2,500. The extra dollars will buy you more speed, better color quality, sharper text and the ability to handle large-format paper.
Advantages of ink jet printers:
Price. They're less expensive than laser printers, although low-end laser printers are coming down in price every day.
Color. You can get amazingly good printed color for a few additional dollars. This makes them a good bet for families with children, although business users are learning that a splash of color can have a high impact in reports and presentations. If you have a scanner or digital camera, a good ink jet printer can reproduce photos that look as good as standard prints.
Disadvantages of ink jet printers:
Speed. Ink jets are slower than laser printers, and they aren't suited for high-volume work.
Inconsistent quality. Their print quality is also less consistent than that of laser printers, and even at their best, ink jet printers won't produce images as sharp as those produced by lasers, and the print may smear if rubbed or moistened. (New inks have improved on this shortcoming.)
Upkeep cost. The cost of ink cartridges also makes ink jet printers more expensive to operate than laser printers.
These workhorses of the 1980s have almost disappeared from the consumer market, replaced by inexpensive ink jet and laser printers. Dot matrix printers produce images by striking an inked ribbon with tiny wires on a print head that passes over the page a line at a time.
Advantages of dot-matrix printers:
Pin feeding for businesses. They're the only printers that can handle pin-fed, multicopy forms such as invoices, purchase orders and shipping documents.
Disadvantages of dot-matrix printers:
Poor quality. They can't compete with ink jets or lasers in quality.
Noise. They're noisy to boot.
These Rolls Royces of the graphics world use intense heat to transfer color from ribbons to specially coated paper. Thermal wax transfer printers use ribbons embedded with wax, while top-of-the-line dye sublimation printers use special dyes to produce reproductions that are difficult to tell from a photograph. Even the best models of these printers are slow and expensive (both to buy and to operate), but graphics professionals love the quality.
Some printers are better at graphics than text. Others produce beautiful color work but muddy black-and-white images. That's why you should never buy a printer based solely on its specifications. Your eye is the best judge of quality, and you know what kind of printing is most important for you. When you're shopping, always demand a sample page and see if it meets your standards. Some other things you should consider include:
Resolution. All printers work by laying down tiny dots of ink, toner or dye. The dots are so small and close together that they fool your eye into thinking it's seeing solid images. The finer the dots, the better the image quality. This characteristic is known as "resolution."
Resolution is measured in linear dots per inch, or "dpi." A printer with a resolution of 300 x 300 dpi can produce 90,000 dots per square inch. That's the minimum you'll need for decent-looking text in normal correspondence. To get sharp text at smaller sizes, as well as graphics and photos with a professional look, you'll want a 600 dpi printer, which produces 360,000 dots per square inch.
Most of today's better laser printers are capable of 600 dpi resolution. Ink jets range from 360 to 720 dpi, although higher resolutions may require specially coated paper.
Color capability. Some ink jets are better at producing business graphics and text, while others excel at photos. Printers designed specifically for photos often have color ink reservoirs that hold six colors of ink, instead of the normal three.
Speed. Printer speed is usually measured in pages per minute, or "ppm." Laser printers can churn out four to 24 ppm, but you'll pay a premium for anything that can print more than eight pages per minute. Ink jets can produce anywhere from two to seven pages per minute.
But that's only half the story. Most manufacturers' speed ratings are based on printing text documents. Pages filled with complex graphics or photos can take a lot longer to produce. In fact, you'll often find yourself talking about minutes per page -- instead of pages per minute -- when printing complex graphics.
A printer's graphics speed depends on the quality of its internal microprocessor, the size of its internal memory and the efficiency of the software driver provided by the manufacturer.
With laser printers, memory is a good indicator of speed. A printer with four megabytes of internal memory will probably produce that first page faster than a printer with one or two megabytes of memory. But you'll find an incredibly wide variation here, and there's no sure rule of thumb for picking a winner. Your best bet is to look for comparison tests in computer publications such as PC Magazine, PC World and MacUser.
Duty cycle. Duty cycle refers to how hard you can work a printer before it breaks. One reason you can buy an inexpensive, high-quality home printer is that manufacturers use lighter, cheaper parts than they put in office machines.
If you plan to give a printer a heavy workout, inquire about its duty cycle, which is generally expressed in pages per month. Don't try to save a few dollars by using a light-duty printer in a heavy-duty environment: It will inevitably break down at the worst possible moment.
Paper size. Most home and small-office printers are designed for standard 8.5-by-11-inch paper. If you want to handle legal-size paper or use smaller, nonstandard-size sheets, you may need a special paper tray. Printers also vary in their ability to deal with envelopes. Some make it easy, while others will try your patience. If you expect to use anything other than letter-size paper, carefully check the printer's specifications before you buy.
PostScript is a programming language developed by Adobe Systems Inc. It theoretically guarantees identical handling of text and graphics by any printer that contains a PostScript interpreter -- regardless of who manufactured the printer. PostScript fonts were also the first widely available typefaces that could be scaled to any size without a loss of quality. As a result, PostScript has become a standard in the publishing industry, and PostScript printers are common in offices that produce many graphics.
Many manufacturers produce two versions of their printers -- one with their own printer control language and one that also has a PostScript interpreter. You'll pay $500 to $1,000 more for a PostScript printer. Although it doesn't hurt to have PostScript capability, it won't be needed for most common home and small-business applications.
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