Choosing a printer for your business isn’t easy. There are multiple factors which you should keep in mind before making your decision. Since it’s not for home use, you need a printer that can fulfil many office printing requirements as well as features. A small business with its respective requirement can consider buying a business printer with a larger footprint. However, nowadays most of the compact and multifunction printers are more popular among businesses. If space is not a constraint for you in office, then size becomes secondary.
Here are some key features that you should consider before making your choice –
Laser or Inkjet?
Lasers are the preferred choice over inkjets in office, especially if you need to do volume monochrome printing. Although the initial investment in buying a laser printer might be high when compared to an inkjet, the overall running cost throughout its life is much lesser. You would spend less when getting the laser toner refilled as compared to replacing ink cartridges in inkjets. Plus, the printing speed of lasers is higher than inkjet printers. So, unless you are purchasing a printer for image or photograph printing, lasers are ideal for you.
There’s a new class of inkjets available nowadays that come with ink-tank technology. Their cost-per page is much lower than traditional inkjets. Plus, they allow WiFi and mobile connectivity, meaning you can fire a print from your mobile phone over WiFi. So if you need color in the office without the added high printing cost, then these devices are also worth exploring.
Single or Multi-function?
When it comes to office, you majorly print documents, but nowadays, you also often need to scan documents or copy them. This is where buying a multi-function laser printer should be your choice. A few can argue of having a separate scanner, which can offer OCR and other scanning capabilities. Modern MFPs also comes with such features and functions with a similar or higher scan resolution of 1200 dpi.
Moreover, a printer like HP LaserJet Pro MFP M126nw lets you scan and E-mail the document from the machine itself.
Paper handling
The A4 size of normal print paper is common in almost every office. Depending on your business requirement, you can choose the paper you want to use. Buy a printer that supports the desired paper size and quality. As earlier, we talked about photo prints, where inkjet is better than laser, so if you want to print a large size photo, then consider an inkjet that supports larger paper size.
For different size of document printing, you can buy a laser printer, just ensure to select a printer capable of printing that size of paper. For instance, there are multiple paper size A4, A3, B5, Letter, Legal, Tabloid, etc.
Duty Cycle
What sort of load is your machine going to handle? If your requirement is up to 1000 page per month then, you can choose any laser MFP. But to print up to 20000 pages per month, you should buy a printer like HP Neverstop Laser MFP 1200w. This is called the duty cycle.
Lastly, you could also opt for network laser printers, which can connect to the network and provide software that can do advanced monitoring of your print volumes, and give better security, etc.
Check out https://www8.hp.com/in/en/printers/neverstop-laser.html for some good deals by HP.
