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Printers tend to be classified based on office size, into categories like home office, small office and enterprise workgroup printers. But the truth is that its better to think in terms of the volume of paper you need to push through the printer.
A one- or two-person office with a lawyer who needs to print lots of pages regularly may print more pages in a typical month than an entire department in a Fortune 500 company where no one ever prints anything but one- and two-page letters.
An even more common situation is a smaller office that may occasionally need to print a large run of fliers for a mailing to potential customers or a smaller run of a multi-page newsletters to send to current, past and prospective clients.
You can farm out such large, occasional prints job to a copy shop, but paying someone else to print these can get expensive. In fact, unless youre printing enough to justify offset printing, its almost always much more expensive per page than doing it yourself. You dont have to print this sort of job often before the cost of going elsewhere to print exceeds that of buying your own higher-end printer.
No matter what size office you work in, if this situation sounds familiar, its time to consider a printer thats normally targeted towards medium-size offices or workgroups in larger offices.
And if you need to print in color—which is always a good idea if you want to catch someones eye and increase the odds that theyll actually read whatever youve sent them—that means looking at a relatively heavy-duty color laser.