Printers

Years ago, it was a fairly simple matter to choose a printer for your home computer system. The technology was similar to the old typewriter, using a solid object to hit an ink ribbon, thereby transferring the ink to paper. However, in recent years we have seen an explosion in printing technology; the number of different ways printer manufacturers have found to transfer data to paper is nothing short of amazing. Despite the technological advances, there is no printer that will do everything equally well; some printers are best for displaying text and others are best for printing photos. For this reason it's more important than ever to evaluate your needs before deciding on the printer that's right for you.

There are so many different choices of printer technology that we can't efficiently present them all here; we will concentrate on the two main technologies that have enjoyed immense popularity: The ink jet and laser printers.

Ink Jet Printers

There are three major categories of ink jet printers: Three-color, four-color and photo. The main difference between a three-color ink jet and a low-end four-color ink jet printer is that the former doesn't hold both the black and three-color print cartridge at the same time; you have to change the cartridge when you want to switch from black printing to color printing or vice versa. Prices for four-color ink jets are low enough to make it pretty much pointless to buy a three-color printer. Photo ink jets expand their gamut (the range of colors they can produce) by adding extra ink colors to the standard red yellow and blue, and generally come with extra features such as memory card ports or the ability to hook up a digital camera to print photos directly from the camera. If you are considering a photo ink jet printer to print pictures but still need it to print text as well, be sure to check the speed of the text printing as it can often be intolerably slow.

Laser Printers

Instead of using ink, laser printers use a laser and a photosensitive belt or drum to transfer toner to the paper. However, many people use the term 'laser' to refer to laser-class printers; the actual technology employed is quite varied. Laser printers fall under four categories: Monochrome, four-pass color, single-pass color and solid ink. Monochrome is the most popular; four-pass color is similar to monochrome but takes four times as long to print for each photo since essentially four photos are produced on the same page. Single-pass color uses four lasers to reduce printing time, and solid ink uses a block of ink which is melted and then sprayed onto the page (or onto a drum or belt which in turn transfers ink to paper).

Which one is best?

This is a difficult question to answer. Laser printers are faster than ink jets, but can't match the photo quality of the best ink jet printers. Laser printers tend to represent a larger initial investment, but the resources used in an ink jet are more expensive; expect to shell out big bucks to replace your empty ink jet cartridges. If you need to print high-quality photos and you also print a lot of text, but don't want two separate printers, we recommend a high-end laser printer which will produce photos almost (but not quite) as well as the best ink jets.

One final note: If you operate a home office, or for some other reason want fax and copying capability you should seriously consider a multifunction printer which combines scanning and printing into a single device, offering a significant savings in price.