Even after a decade of promises, we still aren’t living in the paperless world. You’ll still need to have a printer. Older printers may have issues with the newest OSes, and many computers today are not sold with the parallel ports that older printers require. Newer printers are usually faster and have better print quality, and they can integrate directly with digital cameras. Multifunction printers integrate scanners for scanning, copying, and faxing. Those are all reasons you might need to buy a printer.

The basics of buying a printer are to determine your needs and budget, research the options, and then determine the best deal for you.

Determine needs and priorities

The first step to buying a printer is to determine your budget. Once you’ve done that, you can consider the printer’s speed, print quality, features, and consumables cost.

Budget

Your budget is the primary limiter of your options. The least expensive printers are $30 or even free after rebate, and high quality color lasers cost up to $1000. Cheaper printers tend to have poor build quality, slower and poorer drivers and OS compatibility, and higher consumables cost. For a good inkjet printer, I typically recommend preparing for a $150-200 budget. I tend to be leery of <$80 and pretty much all Lexmark printers. They have had terrible drivers and very high consumable costs.

Consumables Cost

Ink cost is closely related to the budget. Some printers will have you shelling out $40 for ink regularly while others are only $5-10 for a single-color ink cartridge. Many printer manufacturers are treating ink like razor blazes — give away the printer/razor and make money on the ink/blades. For that reason, consumable cost analysis is very important. However, the value of the consumables cost is only as important as the amount that you print. If you don’t print a lot, it may not matter.

In general, it’s better to prefer color printers with seperated single-color cartridges rather than a single color cartridge. The reason is that most people print predominantly one or two colors, and you’ll be throwing out perfectly good ink of one little-used color in order to replenish the much-used color ink that has run out.

Speed

Your requirement for printer speed is a function of how patient you are and how much you print. If you regularly print 50 color pages, getting a printer that can print 7 pages per minute (ppm) is easily worth the cost difference from one that can only print 2 ppm. The difference is a 7 minute print job instead of a 25 minute print job. Printers that are shared amongst multiple people usually need to be faster than the average printer. Manufacturers vary on whether they report speed in “normal mode” or “draft mode” and the quality/speed can be dramatically different between the two modes. It’s best to look for reviews that consider the quality differences and settings along with the printer speed at those settings.

One of the hidden factors of printer speed is the amount of time from when you press “Print” to when the printer actually spits out its first page. Many printers offload the print job computation to the printer driver, which will calculate the entire print job before beginning the print. This can mean a 20-60 second wait where the printer is sitting idle waiting on the computer to finish computing the print job and actually beginning to print. If you are printing a “rush” printout, that idle time can be particularly distressing because other printers would actually begin printing immediately and finish more quickly. That’s some food for thought.

Print Quality

Print quality is generally a combination of crispness and color accuracy and vibrancy. This is where review roundups can really help since it will allow you to compare how a single image is printed by several printers in order to get a feel for how the printers you are considering will fair. Quality can be affected by the type of paper used, and you’ll want to take account of the printer’s quality with and without special glossy printer paper.

Resolution is the spec manufacturers fall all over themselves to quote to prove their awesome print quality, but don’t fall for it. Read some comparative reviews to get a feel for the real world print quality, which might be dramatically different from what the specs indicate.

Features

Printer features can vary widely. Some printers are designed to be multi-function devices that scan, print, copy, and fax while other printers specialize printing photos and yet other printers are designed to be as small and light as possible for travel purposes. Some printers can connect to digital cameras or flash memory cards and offer the ability to print photos directly without the use of a computer. Other possible features are banner printing, large paper sizes (11″x17″ and larger) support, high quantity paper bins, and network/WiFi/infrared connectivity.

One of the downsides to the multi-function device is that you’ll typically get a machine that does some things well and some poorly. You will need to be especially cautious of the scanner speed/quality as well as the print speed/quality and consumables cost. This adds an extra degree of complexity to the research and decision process.