Shopping for a printer can be a daunting task. With each company offering different features and innovation in its products, making a choice while buying a printer can be difficult. The criteria that a keen shopper should keep in mind can be broken down into simplistic terms effortlessly. It boils down to evaluating the needs of the prospective buyer and understanding the method of operation of the companies that sell printers.

The following things can easily facilitate the choice of the ideal printer:

1. Printing needs
The primary question is how much and what you plan on printing. This, in turn, determines whether an inkjet printer will be appropriate or a laser printer. Color inkjet printers allow a wide variety of options, from a range of documents to pie charts and clear images. The speed of inkjet printers is also commendable.

2. Laser printers
Laser printers, on the other hand, work well when the needs of the prospective buyers are not diverse, for example, if they just need to print documents. These printers have decent speed, are affordable, and cost less per page. This makes them good for an office environment and can be bought in bulk.

3. Cost of the ink cartridges
The business models of all companies that make printers are very similar. The printers are priced at an extremely low price to influence customers, and all their costs are recovered and profits are earned from selling the replacement ink cartridges at high rates. It’s important that you do some research regarding the incidental costs of buying the printer before actually buying a decent printer for a cheap price. Depending on how much you plan to print, it might be a good decision to buy a more expensive printer that sells cartridges at a cheaper rate. The general notion is that if the printing needs are less, it might be better to buy a cheaper printer, but due consideration must be given to the cost of ink cartridges. Finding out whether a cartridge can be refilled instead of having it replaced can be beneficial. Refilling a cartridge cuts the costs in half as compared to buying a new cartridge. Nowadays, tiny chips are added to the printers to track ink and toner life, which, in turn, makes refilling ink difficult, but this isn’t the case with all printers.

4. Ink plans
Furthermore, companies have different ink plans. For instance, Canon and Epson have an “ink tank” feature. Cartridges can be refilled from small bottles of ink when this feature is availed. Brother has some models of printers that can pack multiple cartridges. This reduces the hassle of replacing cartridges ever so often and reduces the transaction costs of replacing cartridges.

5. Additional shopping tips
Other features that you must check for when buying a printer include:

• Duplexing (two-sided printing)
• Networking capability
• Memory cards
• PictBridge
• Online storage
• Paper handling (envelopes, glossy stock, and index cards)
• Speed
• Resolution
• Color consistency