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The advice on this page is not intended to be a complete guide to each topic, nor is it a make/model buying guide - rather we want to highlight practicalities that are often overlooked, and make recommendations based on our experience of real computers in use by real people in real schools and homes.
In keeping with our policy throughout the site, our advice is based on experience and merit, not on commission or kickbacks - we don't accept any form of commercial influence.
If you find our recommendations useful, please spread the word!
Apologies - This section is not ready for publication yet, however please feel free to contact us for advice.
Apologies - This section is not ready for publication yet, however please feel free to contact us for advice.
Choosing a Printer
Firstly and most importantly - if you want to save money, ignore the purchase price of a printer! By far the biggest cost of any printer (unless it breaks down early on) is the cost of the consumables it will consume during its lifetime; printer manufacturers know this fact because they have deliberately created it. Very generally, the cheaper the printer range, the more expensive it will be to run.
Printers are priced rather like mobile phones - the initial purchase price is heavily subsidised in order to tie you into buying over-priced consumables. To add insult to injury, many inkjet printers and cheaper laser printers are supplied with 'starter' cartridges that have hardly any ink in, so you will soon discover the reality of this business model. A full set of cartridges typically costs 50-100% of the price of the printer. Total lifetime cost is the only realistic way to compare the economics of printers, and to do that you need some idea of your expected usage.
Types of Printer
In a nutshell the choice is between basic inkjet (£30+), photo inkjet (£60+), dye sublimation (small format specifically for photos, £60+), mono laser (£70+), colour multi-pass laser (£140+) and colour single-pass laser (£200+). In each class you can choose to have a printer only or a 'multifunction device' (printer + scanner), and you can choose to have USB-only or USB + built-in networking.
Printer Technologies
Inkjet printers are currently the most common for home use. They squirt tiny drops of ink onto the paper, a strip at a time. The highest resolution (most detailed) 'photo' printers use inkjet technology, but to get the best results you always need to use special, expensive paper. 'Business' inkjet printers are the cheapest to run and the fastest, but they are a dying breed now since colour lasers have dropped into the same price range.
Inkjet ink comes in cartridges. Printers that have one cartridge per colour (i.e. 4 or more cartridges) tend to be cheaper to run than the sort that have only a 'black' and a 'colour' cartridge. All inkjet printers are very sensitive to the quality of paper you use, so it is worth paying a bit more for smoother, whiter, more opaque, less absorbent paper.
Dye Sublimation small-format printers are specifically for producing photos - they produce glossy, high quality prints on special paper. Often the paper and ink is sold as a single consumable so the cost-per-print is easy to calculate. They are convenient but much more expensive than taking your camera's memory card to a local Asda or other photo franchise.
Laser printers are the printer of choice for most applications except photos. They use a similar electrostatic process to photocopiers to apply dots of plastic powder (toner) to the paper and melt it on. They process a whole page at a time and tend to be much faster than inkjet printers. They are also more reliable in heavy use, and are less fussy about paper quality. Built-in networking is a common feature, so they are well-suited to sharing between several computers. The downsides are that colour lasers can be big, heavy and noisy, although several small ones ideal for home use are on the market.
Laser toner comes in cartridges that can look alarmingly expensive (£40 - 100+), but they almost always work out cheaper than inkjet cartridges - the capacity is measured in 1000s of pages rather than, say 150. Colour lasers always use 4 toner cartridges: cyan, magenta, yellow and black, mono lasers only need black.
Multi-pass colour laser printers 'print' the paper 4 times, once for each colour, making them much slower than single-pass printers, as well as noisier, but they are cheaper. Multi-pass technology is dying out as single-pass printers become smaller and cheaper.
Printer Features
Manufacturers generally produce printers in ranges, just like cars: the 'deluxe' models in a range are basically the same printing engine as the cheaper model with added bells and whistles (such as an LCD screen or wireless networking). The fancy models cost more to buy but are no cheaper to run. Whether a certain feature is worth paying extra for is simply personal preference.
Typical features available include:
Printer Speed
Inkjet printers are notorious for having completely unrealistic speed claims. This is because (a) manufacturers lie, and (b) they quote the 'best case', which is at a very low coverage (speed drops as % coverage increases) and an unacceptably poor quality setting that nobody would really use. Laser printer speeds are subject to the same distortions, but less dramatically, mainly because the fastest, lowest-quality setting on a laser printer is usually acceptable for everyday use. Laser printer speeds are also more consistent because they are not affected by the % coverage.
For Home Use
Economically it is now difficult to justify inkjet printers except for very light use. In households with school children and multiple networked computers doing regular colour printing, a basic colour laser printer will clearly pay its way. However, for all the reasons above, we recommend most home users, not just heavy users, take a serious look at the cheaper colour laser printers, do the sums, then try to work out how to squeeze one in...
If you do a lot of black and white printing and/or copying, a small mono laser printer/multifunction, even as a second printer, is likely to be a sensible economic choice.
For quality photo printing we suggest taking your memory cards to a local shop with a photo printing kiosk - it will probably be cheaper and just as good as typical DIY efforts. Posh photo inkjet printers are only worth the premium if you really need the very best quality and you are willing to buy the type of paper they need and spend the time tweaking your pictures for the best results. The trendy small dye sublimation photo printers are an expensive indulgence - you pay heavily for the convenience.
For School Use
Any school computer technician will confirm that 'domestic' inkjet printers in schools are a bad idea - a constant source of trouble and very expensive in consumables.
Our advice is to have a small number of central or conveniently placed, networked, laser printers, and to have no printers directly attached to any classroom PCs. Laser printers, especially 'workgroup' colour laser printers, sound expensive, but really they're not (although they used to be) - the higher purchase price is an investment which will definitely pay back in terms of cost-per-page, speed, reliability and lack of hassle.
Make sure the laser printer(s) you buy have built-in networking and enough memory - adding more memory later can be a surprisingly expensive upgrade.
Apologies - This section is not ready for publication yet, however please feel free to contact us for advice.
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