Buying that first printerI've been a printer hold-out for a long time, I refused to have one in my house until recently. That's crazy, we can't live without printers you might say. I agree. I use the one at the office. Let those fools pay for all that ink and toner, right? It boils down to a couple things really, color or black and white, all-in-one or not. If you want color in the home, you need an inkjet printer, and from there you can choose to buy a model that has a built in scanner as well. I've heard people justify it a lot of ways, like the ability to print photos, color for assignments at school, that sort of thing. Let's be honest, are you going to buy that expensive photo paper, expensive durabright ink, and then wait 5 minutes for it to slowly peel out of there, and THEN get the scissors out and cut it yourself? I didn't think so. I don't know anyone who bought their inkjet who actually prints photos worth keeping on it. And when all is said and done you get maybe 35-45 pictures and you are out of ink. Everytime you buy ink for this thing you are out another $60-70. These companies make their money on the ink, that is why the printer was $99 to begin with and came with "starter" cartridges that are half capacity. What an awesome scam, I wish I thought of it. If you let the thing sit too long the ink dries out too, it is great. You want to skip past that and just get a laser? No color. And what's more, get your credit card out because these suckers are expensive. And clear a desk because they are big and heavy. What finally changed my mind was that within the past 2-3 years HP and other companies have begun to offer inkjet sized laser printers for an economical price and if you can avoid the ones with the "starter" toner cartridges (the $120 price range or so) you can get a solid 3000 pages from one before needing to change the toner out. And the good news? Toner is about the same cost as a set of ink for most other printers. And a laser will print out documents at lightspeed compared to the slow thrashing an inkjet will do. A small laser printer is exactly what every home should have. If you need color, you can keep a cheapy inkjet lying around but I think you will agree that color is superfluous in most cases. If you run a home business, the durability, speed, printed page capacitity, and print quality make the laser a requirement. If you send an invoice made on an inkjet, believe me they will notice the difference. All Articles |
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