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Business IT Guide to choosing a printer

The cost of printing documents has made many businesses consider what, when and how they are using printing facilities. This guide will help you buy a printer to suit your business.

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Despite moves towards a paperless office, every business needs to print out some form of documentation. Even though fewer letters may be being sent, comanies still need to print invoices, reports, documents and occasionally emails.

The cost of printing documents, as well as general environmental awareness, has made many businesses consider what, when and how they are using printing facilities.

Types of printers for business use

There are two types of printers in common use for small businesses - laser and inkjet. Laser printers are generally more expensive than ink jets, but much less expensive to run if you have to do a lot of printing.

A target price of £80-100 would be suitable for a basic printer printing to handle 50-100 pages per day. Higher prices buy you extra features such as:

• faster print speeds.


• higher print quality


• network connectivity


• more sophisticated paper handling (a dedicated tray for letter-headed stationery for example).

At the £80 price point, you might consider it less expensive to buy two printers in which case you have a backup if one should fail.

Expect to have to buy a cable to go with the printer which will cost around £15-20. Most manufacturers provide a 'starter' toner cartridge that will need replacing more quickly than standard cartridges.

It can help to categorise your buying options under the following headings:

• Running costs


• Speed


• Connectivity


• Quality


• Candidate suppliers.

Printer running costs

ISO/IEC 19752 is an ISO standard introduced in 2004 to determine the toner cartridge yield for mono laser printers, but otherwise there is no independent standard for determining running costs. Instead, you will need to take the manufacturers’ figures as guidelines only. Manufacturers normally publish estimates of:

• Number of pages that can be printed from a single toner cartridge
  
• Number of pages that can be printed before the drum needs to be replaced.

From these you can get a rough estimate of cost per page.

Note that some printers use combined toner and drum cartridges that will tend to lead to higher running costs. You should target around 2p per page or less for a low cost laser printer.

The ink in an ink jet cartridge is claimed by some to be the most expensive fluid in the world to buy. If you intend to print any significant amount, you should consider laser technology instead. Ink jet is fine for occasional printing, though.

If you intend to print a lot of one colour (if your logo and material is predominantly blue, for example), you can significantly reduce your running costs by looking for a printer that uses separate ink cartridges for each of the primary colours. Normal printers use one cartridge for black and a second cartridge for the coloured inks; you have to discard the cartridge if any of the colours run out.

Printing speed

Printing speeds vary depending on what you are printing and, again, there is no independent standard for determining print speeds. You can get some indication of the print speed based on manufacturers’ estimates in pages per minute based on ideal conditions. At the bottom end of the range, expect a quoted print speed of 15-20 pages per minute.

Speed is not normally a big issue for inkjet printers, since you buy them for occasional use. Expect around 5 pages per minute.

Printing connectivity

The common connection method is USB. We suggest you avoid any printer that works only with a parallel printer port because these ports are disappearing from laptops and so printers that use parallel ports will not work with these laptops.

You should also consider printers that support a network connection. These printers will allow all your employees to print to them when connected to a network.

Print quality

In practice, for business purposes, you can expect any laser printer from an established supplier to produce acceptable quality printing for letter and document printing. Expect a minimum quoted print quality of 600 x 600 dots per inch.

Quality becomes more of an issue if you expect to print colour diagrams, especially if you're printing them for clients or customers. Remember that the quality of the paper you use can have a significant bearing on the quality of the result.

We suggest you avoid devices that headline their use for printing photographs. These are likely to provide features you do not need in business (unless, of course you print photographs in the course of your business) and by tuning the printing capability for photographs, you might find that you use up your toner and ink cartridges much faster.

Further reading
IT Zone print management and money-saving tips

Source: Printing documents
The Business IT Guide enables businesses to make the right IT decisions.

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