There are thousands of varieties of printers in the market.   Each is marked with a different price, speed and specifications.  Having a rough idea of what you’re going to buy is very good; there is no need of buying an item that will not serve you as intended.  There is need to prioritize a list of basic requirements such as lower costs, being able to produce prints, good speeds, to list a few.

Type of printer

Some printer types can accommodate A4 and A3 printing.  However, their prices in the market vary in the same way; high capacity printers are more expensive than low capacity ones.  For everyday printing needs, an A4 printer is good; A3 printers can be very expensive at times so if times are hard, users can buy A4 printers then choose to outsource any A3 printing work whenever needed.

Earlier on, many laser printers only printed black and white outputs while inkjets were best known for mediocre colored text production.  In the recent times, technology has rolled out color laser printers.

Color outputs

For office needs such as printing simple black and white  text documents, reports and letters, a laser printer will be more suitable as it offers crisp outputs and consumes as low toner ink as possible.  For color printing, an inkjet printer will suit best.  Many Inkjet printers are packaged with color cartridges unlike Laserjets which use a single combined color toner.

Costs of toner or cartridges

When selecting a printer for intended needs, the cost of toner or cartridge replacement is likely to be a top consideration.  High yield cartridges can actually help to keep costs down, because inks for each color are separate.  Perhaps, you will never run out of all the colors at the same time, so there will be no need to replace all of them at the same time.  To calculate ink costs, you also need to figure out the type of work and quantity of prints required, daily, weekly then monthly.

Printer resolution

Printer resolutions are normally expressed in dots per inch (dpi) or lines per inch (lpi).  Most common printers have a 1200 by 1600 dpi resolution which offer basic standard quality.  For a fair comparison of printout quality and hardware capabilities, non-interpolated printers are the best of choice.  Other printers will also feature a 600 by 600 dpi and this is also a standard capacity.  Generally, a printer with an onboard memory cache will be able to handle large image files, but it will also make no sense to print out an incredibly detailed image on a printer that is not ideal for the purpose.