Make an easy-to-use printer your bottom line. (What good are the bells if you can't ring them?) A printer should polish your communications, so choose a laser for swift, crisp text printing and look to an inkjet for photos. If your company needs to fashion text printouts and photos in-house, you may need to splurge on both a laser and an inkjet.
What can't a printer do for my business?
Because of the output quality gap between laser and inkjet printers, you'll be hard-pressed to find a Ferrari-fast, text and photo dynamo in one package. Most all-in-one printers that print, scan, copy, and fax from the same machine fall short of gold stars in every category.
Bonus all-in-one printer uses
Multifunctions are the Swiss Army Knives of the printing world. Here are some little-known features in all-in-one printers:
Multifunctions are the Swiss Army Knives of the printing world. Here are some little-known features in all-in-one printers:
- Brochure, label, and banner printing (to broadcast your logo)
- Negative and slide scanning (to restore fading photos)
- Scan to fax, Web site, or e-mail (to share documents on the fly)
Start at $100 for a bare-bones, one-person laser printer without color or $250 for a network-ready laser that will let you print from any computer on your network. Color lasers have hit the sub-$500 sweet spot in the past couple of years, while $150 buys a respectable inkjet. Multifunction lasers that also copy, fax, or scan start at about $300, and a low-end photo inkjet all-in-one is one-third that price. Large workgroups should budget $1,000 or more for a printer to handle rush-hour workloads.
Are there any hidden, recurring, or long-term costs of owning a printer?
Nothing beats a laser printer for long-term affordability--toner kits last a long time and are relatively inexpensive. Refueling inkjet printers, on the other hand, is a notorious budget buster. Scope out the cost of toner or ink refills for the printer of your choice, and find the manufacturer's estimated cost per page, if provided. A penny per page is ultracheap for a laser; 13 cents a sheet is on the low end for an inkjet.
