Best Compact Laser Printer For Home – How to choose the right printer for your home office / What you choose depends on what you need
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Best Compact Laser Printer For Home
The need for home/office printers has increased as more of us work from home or study at school. You may be a parent who needs to print workbooks for your child. Or you may find that it’s easier to annotate a work report using a pen or pencil than a keyboard. Or you suddenly discover that a government agency requires you to send them a form. Or you’re tired of going to your local office supply store to print custom forms.
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Regardless of the reason, if you need a printer, it’s not hard to find. Printers haven’t changed much in recent years; they became more efficient and cheaper. You’ll still have a choice between laser and inkjet printers, color and black-only printers, and all-in-one printers and MFPs. With all these decisions to make, it’s a good idea to figure out what you want before you hit the “buy” button on your favorite shopping site.
I’m not going to tell you which printer to buy in this article. But I’ll go over some of the options you’ll face and some of the features you’ll want to make sure you get, including inkjet vs. laser, multifunction vs. single-function, and how to decide what to buy. and where to buy.
If you haven’t bought a printer recently or have never needed one, you may want to quickly learn the differences between inkjet and laser printers. The following is a gross simplification, but it will give you a general idea of how they work.
Inkjet printers spray tiny droplets of liquid ink onto a page. There are several types of inkjet systems, but most consumer systems use separate ink cartridges, each with a print head that disperses the ink into nearly microscopic droplets. (Professional-grade inkjet printers will usually have separate printheads that are self-replaceable.) Colors are created by mixing different colored inks.
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The number of ink cartridges used by a color inkjet printer varies. The cheapest printers usually use only two cartridges – one with black ink and one with cyan, magenta and yellow inks. Most entry-level and mid-range inkjet printers offer four separate cartridges—blue, red, yellow, and black ink. Higher-end printers will have a second black cartridge for text; printers used by photographers or businesses will have a wider range of color inks.
But even the cheapest inkjet printers can cost you serious money. The printer itself may not cost more than $50 or $100, but a set of cartridges can cost nearly as much. And since most color inkjet cartridges won’t work at all when one of the cartridges runs out of ink (for example, if the blue cartridge runs out, you can’t just print in black), you’ll need to replace all used cartridges. . (We’ll deal with ink costs later.)
There are some inkjet printers known as super tank printers that offer refillable tanks at a lower cost than traditional ink cartridges. They are sold by several manufacturers, such as Brother, Canon and Epson, and are worth considering if you plan to do a lot of color printing.
The Pixma TS Series is a compact all-in-one printer with a 1.44-inch OLED window as well as front and rear paper feeding.
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These devices use a laser to generate static electricity on a drum that rolls inside the printer. Static electricity draws the molten toner (powder ink) onto the paper.
Although toner cartridges are initially more expensive than ink cartridges, they last longer than liquid ink; as a result, your cost per page will be lower. Laser printers also cost more initially than inkjet printers, but they can save you money in the long run.
Laser printers have several other advantages over inkjet printers – unless you need color. They are faster than inkjet printers (especially low-end inkjet printers, which can be very slow), and their text print quality is more accurate (although today’s inkjets are accurate enough for most documents).
Color laser printers are also more available than ever before. However, they are more expensive and unless they are professional printers, the color will not be as good as an inkjet printer for the same price.
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One of the smallest laser printers in its class, the HP LaserJet M110we is perfect for printing black-and-white forms and documents.
There are several other factors to consider before purchasing a new printer. Here are some questions to ask yourself when deciding what to buy.
One way to decide whether to buy a laser or inkjet printer is to think about what you want to do with it. If color isn’t important to you, that’s fine. A laser printer will be more economical and faster. But if you want to color print your kids’ computer artwork or print a unique photo, you’re probably in the market for an inkjet printer.
If you find yourself working from home in the near future, or even if you don’t, you may want to consider an all-in-one printer (also known as an all-in-one or satellite printer). These devices don’t just print from your computer, they also allow you to scan and copy existing documents, or save them as files. (Some also allow you to fax a scanned document, but this feature is quickly disappearing as fax communication becomes less common.) They are very useful for minimizing paperwork in your home, as you can save PDFs of most of your documents. (especially the copies you’ve been sitting on for years) and then throw away the actual printed copies.
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(Yes, you can use your phone’s camera to scan and upload documents, and if you only need to scan a document once, that might be enough for you. But the quality of a scanned document on a phone isn’t that great. A good scanner is only as good.)
Most consumer MFPs allow you to copy paper up to 8.5 x 11 inches (commonly known as letter size), but you can also buy printers that can handle 8.5 x 14 inches (legal size) paper. If you find yourself doing a lot of copying or scanning, you should look for an all-in-one with an automatic document feeder (commonly called an ADF) that allows the system to quickly transfer multiple pages.
Most current printers work by pulling the paper from the front, feeding it around a drum or roll, and then ejecting it to the output tray. However, if you’re printing on heavier paper, you don’t want to bend the paper; in this case, you may want to look for a printer that has an input tray that comes from the back of the printer to push the paper in a straight line.
Some printers also allow you to front multiple paper trays, allowing you to select different colors of paper, or hold letter-size paper in one tray and legal-size paper in another.
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You’ll also want to know how many sheets the input and output trays can hold. For example, if you plan to print a 200-page manuscript, you don’t need an output tray that can only handle 50 pages, or find your 150 pages scattered on your floor.
The ability to duplex – print on both sides of a page – is more common than ever, but not all cheap printers have this feature. Especially useful if you print a lot and want to save on paper costs. Of course, most printers allow you to print on both sides of the paper by manually feeding the paper back to the printer after the first side has been printed – but this can be a real pain in the neck.
Arguably, the biggest expense for a printer is the ink, not the printer itself or even the paper. There’s one way to calculate how much a printer will cost you in the long run: calculate the cost per page by dividing the cost of an ink cartridge by the cartridge’s sheet yield, or the number of pages you expect to print. from each patron.
You can usually find page yield among the statistics provided by the printer manufacturer. For example, take two multifunction printers, one color inkjet printer and one black-only laser printer from the same manufacturer.
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The biggest expense for a printer is not the printer itself or even the paper, but the ink
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