Printers

Printers start below Rs. 2500, and can go up to several lakhs. So how do you choose between them? And what do you get by spending more up front? Check the following -

Laser or inkjet?
For most needs you shouldn't bother looking beyond inkjets. Laser printers are significantly more expensive. But if your business demands a lot of printing, a laser
printer is a smart buy. It's significantly faster at printing, generally cheaper overall to run. Toner cartridges aren't cheap, but they last a long time, so you get more pages of print per cartridge. Laser printing tends to give better results with text.
It's difficult to check how quickly a particular printer can produce pages, because there's no such thing as a 'standard page'. How much text should it have? How much colour? How many images? So manufacturers quote an average speed for whatever they think an average page looks like. Don't take it literally. A printer that claims to do 20 pages a minute will almost certainly be quicker than one rated at 4 pages per minute. Just don't expect it to be five times as fast.

Ink
Manufacturers make considerably more profit from ink than they do from the printers themselves. And you can expect to get through a lot of it. Inkjet printers use ink cartridges - usually between one and four, but sometimes more. Typically there's one cartridge for black - the colour that gets used most, plus separate cartridges for cyan (light blue), yellow and magenta (purple). A mix of these creates other colours and shades. Be careful of printers that have a single cartridge for the three 'other colours': when you run out of one colour, you have to replace the whole cartridge.
For the more common makes and models, there are fully compatible work-alike cartridges available at a slight discount; you'll find these at the bigger retailers, including office supplies catalogues, PC superstores and even some supermarkets.
Some of these 'third-party' cartridges are just as good as the printer manufacturers' brands, but not all - you might not get as much ink in the cartridges and it might not be as opaque. For some cartridge makes, you can get refill kits that involve messing around with syringes and inkbottles. It's a cheap solution, and you might be disappointed at the results.