Your ultimate guide to printer shopping

This is a guest post written for TechnologyBlogged from InkCartridges.uk.com, an online store which sells ink cartridges online. Follow them on twitter.

Buying a printer can be a boring and sometimes confusing task. So to help you know what you need in the printing world we have put together this guide to shopping for a printer.

To start off we need to know what sort of printer you need. The best way to do this is to think about what type of printing you’ll be doing and how much printing you will be doing.

Laserjet or Inkjet

There are two main types of printer that are readily available on the market today: the laserjet printer and the inkjet printer. Which one of these two printers you need depends on what you want to print.

If your planning on printing photos then ideally you want a good inkjet printer, photo specific inkjet printers such as the HP Photosmart series exist and are maybe the best choice if you want high quality photo printing, but having a Photosmart printer or similar is not necessary to print great photos.

If you play on printing a lot of text based documents or maybe even invoices, then a laserjet is probably the best type of printer to you. The cartridges cost more, but you get a load more prints from them.

Cartridges

Before purchasing a printer go online and check what ink it takes. Ink prices vary a lot, one thing you may want to check is whether you will be able to get compatible or re-filled cartridges for the printer you have in mind as this can save you a lot of money. Lexmark printers are probably a no go if you’re looking for a printer that does take 3^rd party or refilled cartridges as Lexmark is currently cutting down on allowing these.

It’s also important to check the page yield of the cartridges the printer will take. The page yield is the amount of pages a cartridge will print. The bigger the page yield the more prints you will get from your cartridge. You should also check if the printer comes with a regular cartridge or just a starter cartridge… starter cartridges are smaller cartridges that contain less ink/toner that sometimes come with the printer.

Printer Specifics

As well as working out the type of printer you want, you should work out what specifications your printer needs.

Automatic Duplexing (the ability to print on both sides of one sheet of paper automatically) is something you probably want, it makes printing a lot easier and will save you money on paper.

Something else to consider before buying a printer is the duty cycle of the printer. The duty cycle essentially the durability of the printer and how many prints will be recommended per month.

WIFI abilities are also something to look for nowadays, if you want to be able to print from your computer wirelessly it is essential and it makes printing from more than one device on your network a whole lot easier.