You may miss out on the nightly doughnut runs, but you are becoming more streamlined – not only in your midsection, but also in the printing equipment you're using.
Home office printers are more powerful than ever these days. "The technology has grown by leaps and bounds," says R. Craig Allen, product manager for consumer imaging at Epson. "As an industry we've increased the amount of nozzles on the printer head, reduced the size of drop lifts, and thus enabled our printers to print with more detail."
Confused? Well you can be confident that the quality of the products has improved, even though you probably need a tutorial to clear up the tech talk.
 |
| Kodak EasyShare Photo Printer 500 |
MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHINGIn printing, as well as with so many other things, you get what you pay for. A reasonably good inkjet no-name printer can run from $100 to $300. Multifunction printers, which combine fax, copier and scanning capability, are about $300 to $400. Some monochrome laser printers cost $200, while a top of the scale colour-laser printer capable of near-print-shop quality might set you back $800 to $1000.
But price is only a partial indicator of printer quality. A far better gauge is the specs, or performance characteristics, of various printers practical for home-office use. Barbara Krasnoff, About.com's printer and scanner guide, says that the two most important specs to look at are pages per minute (ppm) and resolution.
Pages per minute is a measurement of how fast the unit can print. "This can vary widely, so the best way to judge is by comparing several similar printers," Krasnoff counsels. "Be aware that, when you're looking at the specs on a vendor page, what you're looking at are the maximum pages that will be printed each minute. This is usually at draft speed, which is faster, but very low quality. You will seldom actually hit that speed." If you're buying a colour printer for photos, drawings or presentations, colour printing is usually slower than monochrome printing. However, in such cases, quality is more of a shopping guide than raw speed.
When you talk about printer quality, you're referring to a characteristic called resolution. Resolution measurements indicate how sharp your image or text is going to be. For printers and scanners, resolution is most often expressed as the amount of dots per inch (dpi). "The higher the resolution, the better the print quality," Krasnoff says. Text printers should offer at least 600 dpi, while images will demand 1200 dpi or higher. To put it another way, a 600 dpi resolution means that you'll be asking your printer to print 120,000 dots per square inch on a given page.
 |
| Epson's Stylus Photo RX700 |
