Your Guide to Buying a New Printer

If you’re considering buying your first printer or even if it’s just time to replace your old one, we thought that a guide to buying a new printer might come in handy.

There are two types of home printer: ink printers and laser printers. We’ll look at both and discuss their pros and cons. Let’s start with laser printers…

Laser Printers

Laser printers use a dry powder called toner instead of liquid ink. A laser burns the toner onto the paper, which is why they’re called laser printers.

Laser Printer Pros

Laser printers are brilliant for office work, particularly for printing documents. They print pages of text very quickly.

But their best feature is their running costs. Black and white laser printers use a black toner which is comparable in cost to most sets of ink cartridges, but will last for thousands of pages of prints, instead of tens of pages like ink.

Colour toners for colour laser printers are more expensive, but still last many, many times longer than ink cartridges do.

Both black and white, and colour laser printers are cheaper to run in terms of cost per page than ink printers are making them great for people who do a lot of printing.

Another advantage of toner is that it is already a dry powder, so it doesn’t matter if a laser printer is used infrequently, unlike ink printers which can dry out if not used regularly, making laser printers great for people who don’t do a lot of printing too!

Laser Printer Cons

There are a couple of drawbacks to laser printers, primarily that they aren’t great at printing photos. If it’s photography you’re into, or photographs you want to print, I’m afraid you’ll still need an ink printer.

The initial cost of laser printers can be quite high too. Black and white laser printers are slightly more expensive than ink printers, but colour laser printers can be hundreds of pounds to buy.

Another drawback is the cost of the colour toners for colour laser printers; a full set can be hundreds of pounds. They still work out cheaper in terms of cost per printed page, but it’s a lot of money to spend initially for consumables.

Finally, is size. Black and white laser printers are quite small and compact, but multi-function colour laser printers can be enormous and very heavy.

Now we’ve looked at laser printers, let’s take a look at their more common counterparts, ink printers…

Ink Printers

Ink printers use a liquid ink commonly supplied in plastic cartridges or bottles. The ink is sprayed onto the paper by a small jet, which is why they’re often called inkjet printers.

Ink Printer Pros

Ink printers are far superior photo printers when compared to laser printers and can utilise glossy photographic paper for even better results.

Ink printers are also much cheaper to buy than laser printers, and even multi-function machines are much smaller and lighter.

Ink Printer Cons

Ink cartridges are expensive, and they never last as long as we might like. A full set will likely cost around £50 on average and will probably print less than a hundred pages of text or less than a handful of colour photos.

Ink is a liquid, and it can dry out. Printers which have a separate cartridge for each colour and printers that take bottles of ink are both much more prone to this happening.

If the ink dries out it can block the printhead (the part that applies the ink to the paper), it isn’t easy to unblock a blocked printhead, and it can sometimes mean the end of the printer!

Unfortunately, the only way to prevent ink from drying out and blocking the printhead is to print regularly (two or three times a week) to keep the ink flowing through the pipes.

Oddly, this means that the more you use an ink printer, the longer it tends to last. However, that said, the average life expectancy of an ink printer is only three years regardless.

Now we’ve given you an overview of the different types of home printer. Let’s just quickly discuss features and connectivity…

Printing. 

All home printers, whether laser or ink, colour or black and white should be able to print on paper up to A4 in size. Larger printers that can print on larger paper sizes like A3 and above are available but tend to be very large and expensive.

Scanner/Copier. 

Printers described as “multi-function” have a scanner built-in to them, allowing you to scan documents and photos into your computer, or to use the printer as a photocopier. You’d be hard pressed to find an ink printer that isn’t multifunction, but it is common for laser printers to not have a scanner built in. So, keep this in mind when you’re choosing your new printer!

Connectivity.

Almost all printers these days are wireless (Wi-Fi). Meaning that you can connect a new printer to your computer with a USB cable or connect it via Wi-Fi. Cabled connections tend to be more reliable and easier to setup. But wireless is so much tidier and more convenient and it’s not difficult to setup if you follow the instructions carefully.

Mobile Printing.

Most Wi-Fi printers can be used with smartphones and tablets. Although this isn’t always easy to setup. We do tend to recommend buying a printer for use with your computer, and if you can get your smartphone or tablet to print, then treat that as a bonus.

So that’s it, our quick guide to buying a new printer. I hope you’ve found it helpful. Remember we keep printers in-stock and are always here to offer advice on choosing a new printer and to help you install it and set it up!