I Do..Or do I? Whether to Choose an Inkjet or Laser Printer

You may have noticed much of the world is in a state of depression at the moment.  So, unless the financial crisis is passing you by like a mere mallard on the gargantuan lake of your accounts, you will realise that it is more important than ever to purchase the correct printer for your needs.  Let us not be so bold as to assume this will be an easy task; there are loads of printer companies out there, including Dell, Canon, OKI and HP; too many to write off as being “basically the same”.  For this reason I have seen fit to write a brief overview to printers in general, to help you gain a better idea of which kind of printer will be best suited to your company.

Buying a new printer its like getting married; as exciting as it is, few people enjoy the forward planning, the frustrating amount of details involved and the constant worrying about whether you have chosen the right one.  After all, we’ve all heard horror stories about people that have made the wrong choice and ended up with something that costs them a small fortune in the long run.  Whether it be potential wives of potential printers, there are essentially two kinds; good-looking but slow, or not so good-looking but convenient.  In the world of printers, the former is known as the inkjet and the latter as the laser printer; deciding which kind is best for you is the foundation of choosing a printer because, unlike in marriage, there is no easy way out for the poor individuals that invest in the wrong printer

As I have mentioned above, inkjet tend to produce fantastic image quality, but at an incredibly arduous pace.  Hence, for people that need to do a lot of printing in a very short time, they are utterly useless.   What’s more, just like their spouse equivalent; good-looking, slow inkjet printers aren’t great with text and, despite being cheap to get your hands on; they have a reputation for breaking down, stabbing you in the back and costing a fortune to maintain in the long run.  You can purchase a low end model for as cheap as £20-30, but will soon discover the price of replacing the ink cartridges for a couple of years is likely to be many times this original purchase price!  As if that wasn’t bad enough, inkjets need their cartridges changing a stupendous amount of times compared to laser printers, making them even more expensive for companies that rely on bulk printing.  

Laser printers, on the other hand, tend to produce very crisp text documents and solid-colour images at breathtaking pace; since the only images most companies need to print are logos and charts, laser printers are hence the perfect combination of quality and speed.  The downside is that, although monochrome laser printers can be purchased for as little as £120, colour laser printers cost between £200 and £400 – way more than their inkjet brethren!  However, as I have mentioned above, toner cartridges in laser printers do not require changing anything like as often as inkjet cartridges, which makes the overall cost of a lasers and inkjets quite comparable.  If your company printed 2500 mixed text and graphics colour-pages, for example; a laser printer could probably manage this with a single change of toner cartridge.  An inkjet, on the other hand, would probably need its ink cartridge changed around 10-12 times!  

Taking into account the price of their cartridges and the frequency with which they need to be changed, the price of producing an A4 page of standard quality text with an inkjet is around 8p.  By comparison, a laser printer can produce much crisper text for a mere 1p per page!  Producing a combination of text and images on a laser printer will still only cost around 2p, but the quality of the graphics and images doesn’t quite compare to the beauty produced by top-end inkjet printers.   However, the down side to these pieces of inkjet art (as you’ve probably guessed) is that they cost a fortune to print; around 30-50p per page!

The bottom line is that companies that produce lots of text documents should definitely invest in a monochrome laser printer; they produce the best quality text, as fast as possible at a small overall cost.  The OKI laser printer B2200, for example, prints a page of crisp text every 3 seconds for around £100! OKI Toner cartridges do cost around £35 a time, but they only need replacing once every 2000 pages.  Colour laser printers are also the best choice for companies that do a large amount of mixed printing; the overall print-quality of text and graphics is likely to be better, quicker and cheaper and the overall costs to an inkjet is comparable in the long run.