PRINTERS

LASER PRINTER

A laser printer tends to be faster than an inkjet and while toner cartridges for laser printer are more expensive than ink they last a lot longer Laser printers generally give clearer and sharper text reproduction and may be better for handling envelopes cards and nonstandard paper sizes This may vary for the different elements but in the case of the copier printer and scanner the key measurement is dots per inch DPI Simply put the higher the DPI the greater the detail that is likely to be reproduced DPI may vary for black and colour printing Additional proprietary technologies may be used by individual manufacturers to improve resolution Maximum black and white printing resolutions on inkjet printers vary from 600x600 DPI to 1200x6000 DPI .There is a reasonably close correlation between the low price of some machines and their high running costs that means that some machines are not the bargains they might at first seem A higherpriced machine with a lower running cost in terms of ink cartridges is likely to pay for itself pretty quickly Comparing costs can be difficult but will save you significant amounts on even average usage

INKJET PRINTER

The original advantage of the inkjet printer was that it could reproduce colour when only very expensive laser options could That price differential has all but disappeared but inkjet technology can now produce photographic quality outputs Print speeds and text quality can be lower than laserbased versions and running costs can be considerably higher An inkjet is the right choice for allround use These with monochrome printers most common among laserprinter types may well have colour scanners but are only able to print in black and white Most inkjet printer are able to print in colour and black and white but some cheaper inkjet printers can print both but not at the same time If you want to print a page which contains black and white text and colour images you will need an inkjet printer with four colours The higher the bitdepth of a scanner the higher the quality of the scan Most colour scanners are 24bit and collect 8 bits of information about each of the three primary colours red green and blue This gives excellent quality Scanners with 30 or 36 bits are also available They require printer memory to store and process information while printing Measured in megabytes MB the more memory the device has the faster it will print Allows you to transfer images from the memory card in a digital camera directly to a compatible allinone without a computer or editing software Print size and layout can be set using the controls and the LCD on the camera PictBridge is becoming the standard for digital image transfers and replacing proprietary solutions Faxes can be sent either directly from your computer or by printing a document and feeding it through to send Will store faxes sent to you when machine is not in use Usually supplied with the software for the machine a printer driver controls the communication between your computer and the allinone Updates to drivers are commonly made available from the manufacturers web sites Sometimes called duplex mode means you can print doublesided documents Print speeds usually expressed in pages per minute for allinones will vary so if they are going to be important to you you should compare competing models Most models on the market will print between 20 and 25 black and white pages per minute Colour pages will take longer depending on the quality selected