Investing in a printer can be a complicated business, there are many shapes, sizes and types of 3d printers available to your home and business user than ever before. Printers have also become specialised because of their intended 3d printers.

It's no more a case of "a printer is a printer" ;.Printers are now actually designed to be good in a specific area rather than "Jack-of-all trades", that'll do everything.

An often overlooked issue, is ab muscles serious consideration of cost of ownership, which is focused on of how much it will cost to keep your printer running (see below). So making that decision which printer to choose can be a seriously arduous task, particularly if you are keen to get a printer that's not only affordable to get but additionally inexpensive to run.

So here is the information that you need to learn and consider, but no-one lets you know! We've not expanded which printer is the better at any given time because models constantly change and you will find that information in virtually any current glossy PC magazine off the shelf. Instead, here you will see the nice, bad and ugly bits from the several types of printers available so you may make the best decision yourself.

Inkjet Technology

Inkjet printers form images by spraying tiny droplets of liquid ink onto paper. The size and precision of the dots of ink and the type and quality of the ink itself govern how good the print quality is. A quality inkjet printer can produce very near photo-quality images using specialist photo coated paper. Generally you can find two types of inkjet printers, people that have the printhead built into the printer like Epson, Brother etc and those where in actuality the printhead is in fact on the ink cartridge like HP and Lexmark. There are numerous arguments for and against both technologies, in our experience we are finding both to be very good, the major difference appears to be that the expense of running a printer using the "printhead" type ink cartridge is normally higher.

Inkjet ink is specially formulated for specific printer models and their purpose, much technology is mixed up in development of those inks to improve print quality, longevity, drying speeds and printing speeds etc. Most inkjet ink is produced using dye based ink that may flow easily through the tiny nozzles of the printhead, this sort of ink is good for photos and colour shades but not good for longevity or solid vibrant colour, think of it just like a water colour painting. Lately pigment ink technology has advanced considerably allow use in inkjet printing. Previously ink pigments were too big and would block up the nozzles. This type of ink is good for solid colours and longevity, think of it like a fat painting.

Manufacturers like Epson, HP and Jet Tec are now actually increasingly utilizing a fusion of dye based and pigmented inks to create superb quality photo printing with vibrant colours and longevity too.

Inkjet printers use anything between two and eight ink cartridges to do their job. In most cases the entry-level machines use two cartridges, good all round machines use four and specialist photo printers use six or more. The two cartridge system works fine though can be a bit wasteful on the color ink, so go for a four-cartridge system where possible particularly if you do colour printing. The six or maybe more cartridge systems produce outstanding photos, but may be costly and a suffering to keep changing cartridges (printer does not work if anybody cartridge is empty).

Inkjet printers are the most effective solution for many people and usually are the most economical method to print - until you are printing large volumes.

Portable Inkjet Printers
These printers are small, lightweight and perfect for people on the move. Even though the printing of good quality photographs is normally beyond this sort of printer, basic colour printing is of good quality and the caliber of text print is certainly caused by outstanding considering how big is these tiny portable A4 printers. These printers are not suited to high volume printing.

Inkjet Printers

The Inkjet Printer is the most commonly used kind of printer among home and business users. With excellent all round printing capabilities, from black & white text print and good colour prints through to very hi-resolution, good quality photographs using Inkjet Photo Printers. Inkjet printers are available from cheap entry level to high-end business use machines and can print from photo size prints to massive A2 and bigger sizes, you can find models for occasional use and others for high volume print jobs too. One of the many advantages of Inkjet printers is that you can use a wide variety of media to print on, including standard paper, photo paper, card, t-shirt transfers, canvas, projector film etc, achieving different looks and textures for your prints and print for different purposes. Most Inkjet printers are USB connections and not suited to networks, although models are also available for networks and with parallel connections.

Multi-Function Inkjet Printers

Multi-Function Inkjet Printers have already been built to meet the requirements of home offices and small businesses. These excellent value machines provide multiple solutions in a single compact and user friendly machine i.e. printing, scanning, copying and some likewise have built-in fax machines too. Not just are these machines great for saving space on your desk, but they are also very good for printing too using the same technology as standard inkjet printers. The only thing you should be conscious of is as possible only play one function at any given time and if anything goes wrong having an "All-in-one" machine, you might lose the most of the functions simultaneously!

Laser Printers

Laser printers work in the same method to photocopiers, except they work with a laser instead of a brilliant light to scan with. They work by creating an electrostatic image of the page onto a charged photoreceptor, which in turn attracts toner in the form of an electrostatic charge. Toner may be the material used to help make the image (as ink is in an inkjet printer) and is a very fine powder, so laser printers use toner cartridges instead of ink cartridges.

Laser Printers have traditionally been the most effective printing solution for heavy office users as they produce a quite high quality black text finish and offer relatively low running costs. However, laser printers have advanced a great deal recently and their prices have steadily dropped, consequently nowadays there are compact laser printers, multi-function and colour laser printers all at very affordable prices. Laser printers seem sensible if you need to do a lot of good quality black or colour prints, not photos. The great thing in regards to a colour laser printer is that they'll print a good quality colour image on standard copier paper, so you don't need to utilize expensive photo paper for large jobs. Do check the values of the consumables before you decide the printer as these can be very expensive for colour laser printers.

Laser printers are the most effective solution for folks who are printing in large volumes, that's, in 100's of pages at any given time or 1000's of pages per month. Colour lasers also take a serious while to warm up, so are not perfect for printing single pages.

Solid Ink Printers

Solid ink printers use solid wax ink sticks in a "phase-change" process, they work by liquefying wax ink sticks into reservoirs and then squirting the ink onto a transfer drum from where it's cold-fused onto the paper in one single pass. Solid ink printers are marketed almost exclusively by Tektronix / Xerox and are aimed at larger businesses and high volume colour printing.

Solid ink printers was once cheaper to buy than similarly specified colour lasers and fairly economical to operate owing to a low component usage, today it's certainly not any cheaper than a colour laser printer. Output quality is good but generally not just like the most effective colour lasers for text and graphics or the most effective inkjets for photographs. Print speeds are not as fast because so many colour lasers.

Dye-Sublimation Printers

Dye-Sublimation printers use heat and solid colour dyes to produce lab-quality photographic images. Dye-Sub printers contain a roll of transparent film made up of page-sized panels of colour, with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black dye embedded in the film. Print head heating elements vaporize the inks, which stick to a specially coated paper, as the ink cools it re-solidifies on the paper. Colour intensity is controlled by precise variations in temperature.

Dye-sublimation printers set down color in continuous tones one color at any given time instead of dots of ink such as an inkjet, because the color is absorbed into the paper as opposed to sitting on the surface, the output is more photo-realistic, stronger and less susceptible to fading than other ink technologies.

The downside of Dye-Sub printers is they are generally more expensive to get and run, usually limited to photo sized prints only and can only print onto one kind of specialised paper along with being quite slow to print.

Dye-Sublimation printers are best for folks who wish to link up their digital camera to an objective built printer and print out the best quality photos at home without fuss.

Dot Matrix Printers

Dot matrix printers are relatively old fashioned technology today with poor quality print, slow and very noisy output. This type of printer is no more used until you wish to create invoices using the continuous paper with holes on both sides. The good thing is they are inexpensive to operate!

Cost of Ownership

Many printers today are inexpensive to get, but people are sometimes shocked to find the expense of replacing the consumables (ink or laser cartridges, imaging drums, fuser, oils, specialist papers etc). The expense of replacing the ink can sometimes cost more compared to printer itself! That is one of the very most commonly overlooked factors when printers are reviewed and yet certainly one of the main items to consider before handing over your hard earned cash. Tests run in 2003 by Which? magazine famously compared the expense of HP's ink with vintage 1985 Dom Perignon.

A Sheffield City Council report aimed at helping schools determine the best-value 3d printers to get, calculated total cost of ownership within the lifetime of a printer (not sure just how long that's!). Adding up most of the running costs, ink or toner, paper, maintenance and even electricity, SCC worked out a colour inkjet costs approx 38p per page to operate in comparison to a colour laser which costs approx 7p per page. Sheffield City Council advised its schools that if they printed significantly more than three colour pages each day (assuming a 40-week academic year) they will purchase a laser.