Buying printer - Find out How to Choose

How to buy printers: The big picture: "How to buy printers: The big picture

Author
PC World Canada
July 13, 2006

The Big Picture

For most people, choosing a printer entails balancing price, speed and print quality. But, as models improve, manufacturers differentiate them in other ways. Inkjet printers, along with digital cameras, are changing the way we print photographs. When loaded with special photo inks and paper, inkjet printers are one of the best options for transforming a digital image into a photograph.

For monochrome lasers--whose text quality is so good and uniform that models' output samples are almost indistinguishable from each other--breadth of features is a major selling point. This is good news for busy offices: for example, thanks to extra paper trays and more memory, lasers can print more efficiently; they also come with more capable drivers, and permit easier remote management. And, as colour lasers drop in price, more users can afford to add colour to their workplace documents.

Key Features
Speed: The marketing war among printer vendors has escalated so much that it has yielded utterly meaningless print-speed ratings. Vendors frequently cite ratings based on printing only the simplest text documents, or printing in draft mode, and some don't include the time it takes for the PC to send a job to the printer. In any case, claimed speeds are frequently two, three or more times faster than the speeds you'll see in real-world printing.

In our most recent Top 10 roundup of inkjet printers, the rated text speeds ranged from 5 to 30 pages per minute (ppm)-but, in our tests, the actual text speeds ranged from just 3.8 to 6.9 ppm. Similarly, vendors claimed graphics speeds ranging from 2 to 24 ppm, while our tested speeds ranged from 0.8 to 2.6 ppm.

For a ranked list of all recent inkjet models we've seen, consult our Reviews and Rankings index page.

Though you'll get similarly misleading promises from monochrome and colour laser vendors, you will find faster speeds. In our most recent tests, monochrome lasers printed text at 15.0 to 25.1 ppm; colour lasers printed text somewhat slower, at 6.8 to 18.7 ppm. For graphics, colour lasers' printing speeds ranged from 1.1 to 5.6 ppm--much slower than advertised."

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