10 Steps to Choosing Your Next Printer

By far the most annoying peripheral for a computer has to be the printer. It either jams, runs out of ink or just plain acts funny. You have finally gotten to the point where you have to break down and buy a printer, but the technology changes every six months and you just can’t keep up. Believe it or not the technology hasn’t changed, it has only gotten better.

10. The most important thing to consider is how much can you spend on a printer. The price you are willing to pay ultimately determines the printer you get. Each type of printer has a different price range. Prices for home or small business printers range from $20 to $1000.

9. What features do you need is the next question you should ask yourself. These features are determined by what you do with a printer. If you print a whole lot (you will go through more than a ream of paper in under a month.) you might want to consider a laser printer instead of an ink-jet. Do you need color? A color laser printer is much more expensive to buy and maintain. Most all ink-jets today are color. Or, is it that you print on carbon paper and need something that impacts. For that you will need a dot-matrix printer. Dot-matrix printers are the old printers everyone used to have. They are noisy big and didn’t have a very good quality. Just because they are old technology, do not think they are cheap. They are very expensive.

8. The popular thing with printers is photos. You might want to digitize your old photos, and for that you will need a scanner. Fortunately there are a plethora of printers that have built in scanners, and as an added bonus you will get the copier feature also. These are called All-in-one or Multi-function. Now if you want to scan pictures then most likely you will want to print them out. If you want to print a lot of photos, I recommend a printer with multiple color cartridges. This will allow you to print more before replacing cartridges thus reducing your cost of ink.