Thursday, 08 January 2015
Top 6 Elements To Check When Buying An Inkjet Printer For Home Use
Having a printer in your house is quickly moving from a luxury to a necessity. It enables you to print quickly what you need for work, for your children's assignments and other important tasks. A home printer should be efficient to produce small batches of work. It should give you little trouble with maintenance so do not pick one that is technical to operate. An easy to operate fast to print is the best option as you want everyone in the house able to operate and use it.
This means that when buying, you have to consider several factors such as what is its primary purpose and how easy is it to operate. It is advisable to opt for inkjet printers over laser printers for home use. They are more affordable and less technical. In addition, you have a variety of option to choose if you want one so that you use it to print text only or to print photos or both. Here are the top elements of inkjet printers that you should look out for:-
How does one replace or refill the ink?
When in search of a printer you will definitely need to replace old ink cartridges with new ones at any given point in time. The number of times you replace your cartridges is dependent on the usage. If you have high usage levels, you will find this endeavor rather costly. You will even find that the amount of money that you use for replacing the ink cartridges will be more that the price of the printer itself. If you will not be using a lot of color in your printing jobs, it is recommended that you go for regular models. On the other, extreme end if you are printing jobs that involve lots of color use, look for more complex options that guarantee the color quality especially if you are a photo printer.
What is the printing speed?
Another aspect that you can use to judge the quality of a printer is the printing speed. This is usually measured in pages per minute. Check out the printer processing time before buying it. However, you must be aware of the fact that most quieted speeds given by the manufacturer can lure you into making the wrong decisions, as they do not quote the processing time. A printer with a long processing time can be very inconveniencing especially if you work with short documents. With an inkjet printer, the printer speed tends to vary depending on quality settings. If you will be printing most of your documents or images in color, go for printers that have a fast printing speed so you can guarantee yourself quality prints.
Check on printing quality
Print quality is of substantial importance when you are picking out a printer. Select one that has a higher resolution and will show finer details, especially if you are printing photos. This is most important especially, when you are dealing with colored pictures and is not much of a concern when handling black and white documents.
The ink type
The type of ink is also among the important things that you need to know as you shop for printers. Two distinctive types of ink are dye and pigment inks. While Epson and Kodak models mostly use pigment base ink types, HP as well as canon prefer to use pigment inks. Although there are usually many conflicting views on which of the two ink types is best, there is practically no big difference between the two.
Automatic document feeder
It’s a feature found in most especially newer models and has the ability of saving you a great deal when you are either faxing or scanning documents that feature multiple pages. With the automatic document feeder feature, your scanner simply runs through all pages alleviating the need of having to place all the pages manually for printing. This enables you to handle two tasks at the same time. The printer can be running as you do something else around the house. This way you get to save a lot of time as well as energy.
Wireless technology
Nowadays, you can find printer models, which have WI-Fi. WI-Fi printers are easy to use since you can use them from any angle of a room without having to connect any cables to your personal computer. Another advantage of wireless printer technology is that you can easily use blue tooth to print photos from other devices. However, for this to be accomplished, the device, which you are connecting the printer to, must be Bluetooth enable, the likes of smartphones, newer personal computer models as well as iPads. In addition, documents can be shared among many people within a given period.
The above-mentioned qualities are not the only features that make up a good printer. Other factors one should pay particular attention to include cloud-printing, duplex printing among other top features.