Tips For Selecting A Small Office Printer

When you walk in to any technology or office supplies store to buy a printer for your computer it is easy to be overwhelmed by the choices available. It is wise to do some research beforehand to try and narrow the choice and pick the printer that is best for your business. Here are a few tips to selecting a small office printer:

Ink or Toner?

Laser and LED printers use a toner, instead of ink, and are quite affordable these days. Generally speaking we would recommend a toner based printer for a business, instead of an ink jet printer. They offer good print speeds (compared to ink jet printers) and you won’t find yourself replacing toner as often as you would with ink. However ink printers might be a better choice if you plan on printing on to specialty paper, such as photographic paper. The color with ink jet printers is much more vivid.

As with any printer you should compare the cost-per-page for replacement consumables. What might appear to be a very cheap purchase price could be expensive over the long term. To calculate cost per page, take the purchase price for a toner (eg $90.00), divide by the number of pages that the toner will last for (often 5000 pages at 5% coverage but check), and multiply by 100 to get the cost-per-page in cents.

Example: $90.00 divided by 5000 multiplied by 100 = 1.8 cents per page.

You can calculate cost-per-page from a number of different models and brands to see what is more economical.

Paper sizes and paper trays Small Office Laser Printer

Consider what size paper you are going to print on, if you are deviating from the standard Letter or A4 size. Pretty much all printers have a manual feed if you need to print smaller, such as an envelope. However if you want to print smaller sizes regularly you should look for a printer that has a second paper tray that fits your desired media.

Similarly if you intend printing on large format paper (such as A3) this will dramatically narrow your choices and will incur a greater cost. The demand for larger formats is low and so the options are limited and substantially more expensive. It might be easier and cheaper to head down to your local print store to print the occasional large format document.

MFC or Dedicated

MFC stands for Multi-Functional Device. These are printers with scanning, copying, and faxing built in. Although you might not require such features every day, they can be handy to have in case your other scanning or copying device has a problem or is tied up with other staff.

A dedicated printer on the other hand is likely to be faster at printing, have less things to go wrong, and fewer buttons to operate.

Computer Interface

Every printer these days will have a USB interface. We recommend selecting a printer with a network interface (sometimes called LAN, 10/100, or Ethernet). The advantage of these is that the printer does not need to be connected to a turned-on computer to operate, and so can be placed in the office in a convenient location.

Many modern small office printers also have Wi-fi (wireless network) capabilities, which is great if you have laptops that need to print, but are not always wired in.

From a technical viewpoint the network printers are not as difficult to install as they used to be. You now insert the CD in to your computer, run the install program and it will discover the printer on your network and install the driver for you. The software can also be downloaded from the manufacturer’s web site.

Duplex

If you are accustomed to printing single-sided documents you might not imagine how useful an automatic duplexer can be. Duplex printing means double-sided printing; printing on both sides of the paper. This can dramatically reduce paper usage in your office, which is good for the environment and good for your bottom line. Other environmentally sound ideas for your office can be found in this article of the Small Office Ideas web site.

Duty Cycle

Finally if you are evaluating office printers the product literature often quotes a duty cycle number. This is a recommendation from the manufacturer of the maximum number of pages you can print in a month through the printer. Our experience suggests that this number is highly exaggerated, and you should divide by three to get a genuine number. Pushing the printer every other month is ok, but regular over-printing will wear down the mechanics inside and you are likely to need to get the printer serviced quite frequently.

 

Above we have detailed some key factors in narrowing down your choice for a new printer. If you make a few easy decisions before you start looking, you should be able to find a printer that is best for your small office and performs year in year out.