Which Printer Should I Buy? LASER or INKJET?

Here is where you will learn which type of printer to purchase to suit your needs. Laser or Inkjet.

Here are some quick links to what we talk about in this article.

• What is Laser Printer
• Laser Printer Advantages & Disadvantages
• What purposes Laser Printer is designed for
• What is Inkjet Printer
• Inkjet Printer Advantages and Disadvantages
• What purposes Inkjet Printer is designed for
• Conclusion

What is Laser Printer

Laser printer has a complicated procedure to convert the Toner to the graphic you want on the paper.

Laser printer uses a very fine powder called Toner. The image you send to the printer will be transferred to a very sensitive roller called drum via laser. Inside the laser printer there’s a unit called corona which charges the drum unit with negative charge or negative electrostatic. The drum unit is now exposed to the laser beam which transfers the image to the drum in the form of positive charges or positive electrostatic. So now you have the image formed on the drum in form of negative and positive electrostatic charges. Here is comes another unit inside the printer called Developer, what developer does inside the printer is charging the toner with negative charges and transfers the toner to the drum surface using sets of very sensitive rollers. Now because the toner has the negative charges it will transfers automatically to the places on the drum with positive charges which is made by the laser.

So you have a drum with your image on it formed with toner, now here comes the paper and passes through the drum and all the toner will transfers to the paper, then paper passes through another unit inside the laser printer called Fuser and this unit fuses the toner to the paper using a high temperature roller. Now paper with the image on it slips out on to one of the output trays.

So as you can see it’s a very complicated process being done using very sensitive parts. If one of these parts gets damaged or gets dirty in some way then you will see lines or dots on the paper, which could be caused by one of the rollers or faulty laser or bad drum or bad fuser.

Laser Printer Advantages and Disadvantages

Here are some advantages and disadvantages of having a Laser Printer

      

What purposes Laser Printer is designed for

Laser printers are mostly designed for high volume of printing (higher than inkjet printers) because of the speed. And mostly used in Black & White format. If you are in a business which needs lots of reports, documents, multipage booklets and so on, we recommend to buy a laser printer, the black and white one because the color laser printer is even more expensive and mostly being used by professional print houses. These days printer manufacturing companies have made Color Laser Printers for office use too which is not as expensive as the professional laser printers but you still need to know if you have high volume of printing you will face a high price for supplies like toners.

Here are some of business type using Laser printers

• Lawyers offices
• Newspapers or magazines publishers
• Schools and Universities
• Import and Export companies
• Accountants
• Real estate offices
• Doctors Offices

What is Inkjet Printer?

Inkjet technology can be very complicated, but all the complication sits in the mother board and the electronics inside the printer so if you open an inkjet printer it looks super simple comparing to the laser printer. Inside the inkjet printer is just some sets or rollers controlling the paper feed and a carriage moving the print head back and forth on the paper. The carriage is connected to the mother board of the printer using a set of wires which transfers the information to the print heads.

Every different inkjet brands using different type of control on the print heads (like HP, Canon, Epson, Samsung, …) but basically they are doing one process but in different ways, they need to suck the ink from the ink container and drops it at the right place on the paper.

All the images you print with all the colors in it is basically can be created with 4 simple colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black which is called CMYK, printer creates colors by dropping different amount of these 4 colors on a spot, for example if the spot should be Green, printer drops yellow color right beside a blue color in a very micron distances which your eyes can not see them as separate colors, your eyes will see the Green color which is the combination of Yellow and Blue, so you can make different type of green colors by mixing different amount of Cyan and Yellow or sometimes you can make it darker by adding some drops of Black around it.

Yes, it sounds very complicated, but the complication won’t bother you at all, the only things you need to care about is to keep the paper rollers and the print head clean.

Here is some hints about the Inkjet printers:
In some of the inkjet printers the print head is sitting directly on the ink container which makes the ink more expensive because when you need to replace the ink means you need to replace the print head too which is part of he ink so that makes the replaceable ink cartridge more expensive (in some cases even more expensive that buying a new printer), so I guess you better be careful about this when you buy the inkjet printer.

Inkjet Printer Advantages and Disadvantages.

Here are some advantages and disadvantages of having a Inkjet Printer

What purposes Inkjet Printer is designed for

Considering the Inkjet printers advantages and disadvantages I can say you can buy an Inkjet printer if you are using it for:

• Home use, not much printing
• Printing family pictures in high quality
• If you do not want to spend a lot on a printer
• Small photography shops
• ...

Remember we are not talking about the professional print houses or things like that

Conclusion

Ok what should we do now before buying a printer.

Do not get excited by the salesman, they need you to pay the highest price so they can get the highest commission. They will excite you by the quality, speed and …. Yes, they might be right but you need to remember why you are buying the printer for. Do you really need that speed they are offering you with that expensive printer? If you need to print 10 or 20 pages per month you definitely do not need that speed, and I can tell you since 2010 almost all of the printers will give you the quality you need unless you are a professional photographer or you are an advertising agency, then you make money out of the print and you need to pay for it.

The second thing I can tell you is always think about the time that you ran out of ink or toner. Supplies can be super expensive, I know people bought another printer because they couldn’t afford the supplies for the one they have so always check with the supplier to see if you can buy compatible supplies or remanufactured ones, (You can check inkredibletoner.com for example). These days people always have their smartphones with them so you can check for the price of the supplies on the spot.