Buy a better printer by knowing your printer supplies

While computers get all the attention in most offices, many would not even know that they exist without their loyal outputting companion printers. We print our Word documents, our Excel spreadsheets, our PowerPoint presentations, our accounting statements, our design plans, our advertising graphs, and much more. In short, we print. While many were convinced that printer and printer supplies purchases would decrease with the internet, the opposite happened. Users increased their utilization of printers and their reliance on the printer supplies to print information found during their browsing sessions.

So, chances are, that if you don’t already have a printer you will soon, and that if you have one, you might need another, or perhaps a few other ones, very shortly. How should you choose the best printer for you?

3 tips.

Tip #1: Focus on functionality and budget:

Assess your needs and budget. Find the most printing capabilities, or at least the most pertinent one, that you need within the budget that you have. Specifications to assess should include:

- Speed, or how many pages per minute the printer will produce,
- Resolution of the printing, expressed in dots per inch,
- Whether you will need color printing or will do with monochrome,
- Multiple trays, and whether you will need to have different forms or colors available without having to change tray content each time,
- Dual side printing,
- Multifunction capabilities, whether you will need fax and copier functions or will use the new device for printing only,
- And, of course, whether you will want your new printer to be accessible via a local area network or WIFI networks.

Tip #2: Focus on printer supplies impact on cost per page:

While, many informed buyers will use a similar check list before buying a new printer, few consider the following part in their budget considerations.

A printer’s cost cannot be assessed solely on the basis of the purchase price of the device, but, rather, by combining such purchase cost with the cost of the printer supplies -toner cartridges, inkjet cartridges, drum unit, developer unit, and other laser consumables- to produce an actual cost per page.

The cost per page is the single most important financial measure of the actual price of your new device over the life of the device. And, as you can see, it largely depends on the price of your printer supplies. So, after identifying your preferred printers, visit a well-known printer supplies online web site, and check the prices of the supplies for your printer. Then, account for the estimated yield, calculate the cost of the printer supplies, and compare the printers on the common cost per page measure over the number of pages that you expect to print per year.

Tip #3: Consider quality alternatives:

There are many such web sites, so why a well-known one? Choosing an established vendor of printer supplies online will ensure the validity of the pricing and also provide you with quality alternatives. Indeed, while you can now find compatible printer supplies, toner cartridges, or inkjet cartridges, made by third-party companies to fit in your printers, online, you should only trust those offered by quality vendors or risk seriously affecting the quality of your printouts or even damaging your printer.

So, here it is, needs and budgets, count with printer supplies, consider compatible ink and toner. Good buying.