• Printer consumables
• Printer specifications: Resolution
• How fast is it?
• Duty cycle ratings
• Memory specifications
• Font specifications
• Special media support
• Colour laser printers
• Networking support
• Other considerations: The printer driver
• Is it environmentally friendly?

Colour laser printers

The colour laser printer is one device that many consumers may have never even dreamed about owning because of their seemingly high price tags and large size. The reality is that the majority of these devices are now quite compact and relatively cheap to purchase for the home, and especially the office: you can easily find colour laser printers under the $2000 mark.

Laser printers have several advantages over their inkjet counterparts, especially for organisations with high-colour printing needs (such as design houses).

The big colour advantage over an inkjet is that colour lasers don't need special media (which, for inkjets, can cost $2 or more per page). They are also much faster than inkjet and other impact printers, and the output is far superior, since the toner doesn't bleed, splatter or smudge, as is the case with some inkjets.

Up until a few years ago, colour lasers were very slow, because printing required four passes (one for each of the printing colours - see the glossary). The introduction of LED printers (see the glossary) has allowed them to be compact enough to do one-pass printing (with four separate drums), which provides a massive speed increase - making these types of printers much more efficient.

Networking support

Network printers, a.k.a. workgroup printers, can be connected directly to local area networks and frequently do not require an external print server (i.e., the print server is built-in).

Network printers tend to be large, high-volume printers targeted at enterprises and are priced accordingly. In most SOHO scenarios, it's more practical to connect a printer to one of the office PCs or the office server (or a low-spec dedicated PC) and share that printer using standard networking tools (such as Windows printer sharing).

The crux of it is, if you work in a SOHO environment and have a spare old PC laying around, it may be best to set up that PC as a print server (using Windows printer sharing, for instance) rather than fork out the extra for a workgroup printer.

It's also worth noting here that printers that connect to the PC via the USB port are generally better than parallel port printers on the speed-front, since the USB port has quicker transfer rates (many current printers have both, and even allow multiple PCs to connect directly to the printer at once).