Hey Bruce Naylor your Frugal Tech. Does the terms DPI, PPM, Duplexing, consumables kind of throw it on the loop and you’re looking on maybe to buy a printer in the near future. Listen, I’m making this video to kind of give you some guidelines on what to look for in a printer and some of the features to look for. You know printers are big part of our digital lives. We use it to print our photos and everything from email to invoices. We use them in business, we use them at home. So, I probably give you some guidelines on what to go buy.
First of course almost all of you know, first come in either inkjet, laserjet, there’s color laser, there’s multi-function printers and there’s a whole army of this things out there. And here’s some key definitions I want you to kind of keep in mind and remember there’s only—to be really, really small all the way up to the five of a filing cabinet.
Well, DPI stands for Dot Per Inch. For example, an inkjet printer many can print at 4800x1200 dots per inch and that gives you a lot of very fine detail and of course higher DPI’s can mean slower printing speeds at a finer detail but many inkjet printers use what’s called interpolation. In other words, it’s a software thing that kind of smooths out some of the detail and sharpens an image. However, that may affect overall print quality from your printer. Now, DPI and print quality generally did and do tend to have a correlation with one another.
Now, PPM means Pages Per Minute and that is determined by who makes the actual print engine of the burner not necessarily the manufacturer of the burn so you want to keep that in mind. Capacity is such as number of paper trays, the quality of the paper that those trays hold, ink and toner capacity but all these are important things to keep in mind when shopping for a printer and one little secret of watching it on about—is this basically based on only 3% to 5% coverage on a letter size piece of paper, that works out to about 250 single space words on a document, a letter size document with no bold characters and certainly no graphics.
Think about that when you take a look at how long your total cartridge ink cartridge last. Also look for features such as the memory cards, memory sticks, various slots that you can plug memory devices into and into your printer. Now, inkjet printers can basically cause from almost nothing. The thousands of dollars really depending on what you’re doing now. These are not really meant for large print jobs okay but higher inkjet photo printers can out produce the results of a color inkjet. These are great for printing photos but it could be ultimately pretty expensive so you want to keep that in mind.
Also avoid cheap inkjet refills, look, these things can clog up the printheads and basically cause expensive damage to your inkjet printer. Always get your ink refills from reputable sources. Monochrome laser printers, now those have come way down in price. You can pick those up now from a $100.00 or more and they’re great for black and white text or print. These are ideal for small office, home office operations and they can also offer things such as duplexing, they can offer and possibly an Ethernet port. You can plug it in to the network, things like conditional paper trace and you know that’s always anything to keep in mind especially if you print a mixture of letter or legal, keep that in mind.
Duplexing means two sided printing by the way and you know I normally recommend HP laser jet printers when I talk laser jet printers to the people I know, those things I’ve just had such wonderful lock with HP laser printers.
Nevertheless, the inexpensive multi-function printers you see out there 80 bucks, 120 bucks, 150 buck, these are basically a laser printer or an inkjet printer rather that combines a printer, scanner, and fax and all in one device. Now, remember if that machine dies, you’ve just lost three devices in one so keep that in mind and I do only have a high consumable cause, they’re not very cost-efficient. Ultimately, they’ll cost you in the long run, I advice people to stay away from the inexpensive multifunction devices, whatever problem possible.
We move on next to color laser printers. Now, these are great for printing things like color brochures, color charts as well as out printing of documents and they can do it very nicely on plain paper which saves money on versus buying expensive photo paper but these are also intended more for light print jobs and you really need to look at the print group or the number of people and what’s are printing before you commit to a color laser print because they can be quite expensive, the entry fees probably around $300.00 or up for a color—printer. So, they came way down in price but keep that in mind. And finally, what we call a mid level to upper level MFP or Multi Function Printer. Now, these probably start to run about $500.00 range and can mean the thousands of dollars—got a model up to $5000.00 on this but this ultimately are for the best value to the small business based on the output, based on the price of the consumables and what you’re doing with it.
Remember things such as paper capacity, Ethernet ports, warranties and even service contracts on some of these units, these are going to be designed more for a larger print jobs and for more commercial use but you will ultimately save money with those so remember things like the—based on 3% to 5% total coverage, pages per minute, that’s also based on having very little text on that page and the rating for that is done by the print engine manufacturer which could differ from the manufacturer. So, for a home use, for a light home use, a good quality inkjet printer is probably the way to go. If you got a small home office, a monochrome laser printer is probably the best solution and for a smaller company, I would recommend a mid-high and multi-function printer such as some of the cannon models, HP models, etcetera.
Listen, I hope you find that information helpful. This is Bruce Naylor, Frugal Tech. Make sure to visit us every weekday, Monday through Friday from 1:00 to 3:00PM Eastern Standard Time at live.frugalbrothers.com, and we do a live netcast everyday. I always like to hear from you, make sure you rate our videos, we enjoy your comments and we try to get back with you. And if you got any support question, anything you need—email me at support@frugalbros.com. Bruce Naylor, remember it’s ion your shop not making you money or saving you money, get it all there. I’ll talk to you later.
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