Some printers are built to offer great quality and value for the home user that prints a few pages a week, while others are built for busy offices where multiple users print dozens or hundreds of pages every day. Home or Office: Home and office printers differ greatly in their handling of large print volumes.
Laser printers, on the other hand, can quickly produce professional looking text documents, often at a lower cost per page.
Inkjet printers are generally better suited to producing the full range of colors, making them better suited to printing graphics and photos. Inkjet or Laser: Next, it helps to determine the style of printer you need. And don’t forget ink and toner, which can range from 1 to 5 cents per page for basic documents (photos will cost more). Price: All-in-one printers sell for as little as $60 (£45/AU$90) for inkjet models, and $150 (£170/AU$200) for laser printers, with high-end models costing hundreds of dollars, but offering better print quality, durability and features. Obviously, you want a printer that performs well, so all of our reviews discuss a printer's output quality and speed, but there's more to an all-in-one printer than just churning out documents. There are several key details to consider when shopping for a new printer.
How to choose the best all-in-one printer for you
Read our full Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850 review. The upfront price may be high, but the combination of quality, features and super-low operating expenses make this one of the best investments you can make for your office. But the real draw is the ink savings, extremely low per-page costs of 0.4 cents for text pages, and 1.6 cents per color page. That same quick, high-quality performance was also seen in copying and scanning, making it the printer of choice for offices that need a full featured multifunction printer.
In timed printer tests, the Epson ET-5850 delivered some of the fastest printing we've seen, and produced crisp, clear text that nearly rivals laser printer quality. The printer boasts scan, copy and fax capability, dual 250-page paper cassettes, a 50-sheet automatic document feeder and a large, easy-to-use 4.3-inch touchscreen for convenient operations. A small business printer rated to print more than 3,000 pages per month, it's more than capable of handling whatever your office team might throw at it. The EcoTank design uses refillable ink tanks and comes with enough spare ink bottles to print thousands of pages. The cost of inkjet printers or the inkjet cartridges is usually lower than those of laser printers or toner cartridges respectively but the maintenance cost of inkjet printers is quite higher.The Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850 combines impressively low ink costs with an abundance of business-firendly features to take its place as the best small business inkjet printer we've reviewed. Laser printers, on the other hand, have a faster printing speed than inkjet printers and their prints are much better in terms of longevity.
Now, if you want a better blend of colors and beautiful-looking graphics, then the inkjet printers will suit you better, as their coloring capability is better than that of laser printers. The heat and pressure of the rollers permanently fuse the toner particles to the paper. These particles get stuck on the paper and then the paper is passed through rollers. Meanwhile, in laser printers, the paper is moved along a drum with toner particles. In layperson’s terms, inkjet printers have a lot of nozzles which spray drops of ink onto the paper. The inner workings of these two printer types vary a lot. First of all, you need to decide whether you need to buy a laser or an inkjet printer.