20 Tips For Making Sure You Buy the Right Business Printer

20 Tips For Making Sure You Buy the Right Business Printer by M. David Stone Choosing the right printer for your business is trickier than you may think. There are probably a few criteria that youre most interested in, and its

Most vendors divide printers into categories like personal, small office, workgroup and departmental. Ignore them. If youre a lawyer who prints 500-page documents, your personal printer is likely in the workgroup category. If your office rarely prints

You need a printer that can handle at least as many pages per month as you actually print. If you dont know how much that is, check your current printer for a status page that includes the lifetime page count. Then divide by the number of months youve h

If you cant find a page count in your printer or your office used to print a lot more or less than it does now, you can estimate how much you print from how much paper you buy. Keep in mind that when you duplex (print on both sides of the page), it count

Any business printer should include a monthly duty cycle on its spec sheet. This is not the recommended maximum number of pages per month. Its the maximum you can print without driving up repair costs, but it will still yield a shorter lifetime. The rule

Make sure you know what everyone in your office needs to print. Pay particular attention to types of documents that dont get printed very often, but are critical to print well. A monthly newsletter to clients, for example, may require a level of text qua

If you think of high-quality output as a way to put your companys most professional foot forward, keep in mind that text, graphics and photo quality dont necessarily go together. Make sure the printer you get offers the quality you need for the type of

Virtually any laser printer offers good text quality for standard fonts like Times New Roman at 10 and 12 points. But if you need to print stylized fonts or print small or large fonts — like four-point text in a contract or headlines in a newsletter — d

Laser printer graphics quality varies from barely useful for graphs meant for internal use all the way up to good enough for handouts to potential customers at trade shows. Make sure the printer you get delivers the quality you need. Ask for samples, pref

Except in a few businesses like real estate, most offices assume they dont need to print photos. As more and more printing includes Web pages, however, photos are becoming more important. As with graphics, laser photo quality varies tremendously. Conside

Most people shopping for a light-duty printer in a small office or a personal printer in any size office automatically consider ink jets as the default, inexpensive choice. But if you dont need color, a low-cost monochrome laser is almost always a better

If youre down to a choice between an ink jet and low-cost laser for light-duty printing, keep in mind that claimed speeds arent comparable between the two technologies. The very fastest business ink jets are only slightly faster than the very slowest co

The other side of the color question is whether you can do without it, particularly if your office or workgroup relies on a single printer. Color can convey information in graphs and reports, and can save money by letting you print things like trifold bro

Adding paper to printers is like changing light bulbs: The less often you have to do it, the better. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your printer can hold at least enough paper for a weeks worth of printing.

Its not just the total input capacity that matters. How many trays matters, too. If your office needs to print on three different types of paper — letter, legal and tabloid size, say — three 500-sheet drawers will let you load all the paper types at on

Even if your office doesnt print the kind of documents that require duplexing, consider whether to get a duplexer and encourage people to use it, at least for drafts. Duplexing saves paper, making it both the green choice and a way to save money on offic

If you ever print on anything other than plain, letter-size paper, even just occasionally, dont assume that any given printer can handle it. There are plenty of printers today that choke on heavy weight paper, unusually small size paper or even on envelo

Theres rarely any need to upgrade a printer over its lifetime — to add things like a duplexer, more paper capacity or output bins. But if you think you might need to upgrade, make sure the model you get has upgrade options. Keep in mind too that options

Virtually any MFP with a fax feature will work as a standalone fax machine, but dont assume that an MFP with a fax feature will let users send faxes from their computers, including files on disk. If you want the convenience of faxing from computers, make

Although faxing from computers can be an important convenience to improve productivity, it can also be a security risk. If youre concerned about employees faxing sensitive information from their computers, youll want an MFP that doesnt allow faxing fr

When youre comparing prices between printers, dont be overly impressed by either a low initial cost or a low cost per page. What matters is the total cost of ownership (TCO). To get an approximate TCO for each printer, multiply the cost per page, times

• Channel Products of the Year
• 20 Printer Features that Should Be Standard