DPI's Printer and Printer Accessories.

Buying a printer can be a complicated business, there are more shapes, sizes and kinds of printers available towards the house and little business user than ever before. Printers have also become specialised for their intended objective.

It's no longer a situation of "a printer is really a printer". Printers are now designed to be good in a particular area rather than a "Jack-of-all trades", which will do everything.

An often overlooked concern, may be the very serious consideration of price of ownership, which is all about of how much it will price to keep your printer operating (see below). So producing that choice on which printer to go for could be a seriously arduous task, particularly if you are keen to purchase a printer that is not just affordable to buy but also inexpensive to run.

So here is the info that you need to know and consider, but no a single tells you! We have not expanded on which printer may be the best at any given time simply because models continuously alter and you are able to discover that info in any present glossy PC magazine off the shelf. Instead, here you'll find the great, bad and ugly bits from the various types of printers available so you can make an informed decision yourself.

Inkjet Printers form images by spraying small droplets of liquid ink onto paper. The size and precision of the dots of ink and the type and quality of the ink itself govern how good the print quality is. A quality Inkjet Printer can produce really near photo-quality images utilizing specialist photo Coated Paper. In common you will find two kinds of inkjet printers, those with the printhead built into the printer like Epson, Brother etc and those wherever the printhead is really on the Ink Cartridge like HP and Lexmark. There are lots of arguments for and against both systems, but in our experience we have found both to be really great, the main difference seems to be that the price of running a printer utilizing the "printhead" kind ink cartridge is generally greater.

Inkjet Ink is specially formulated for particular printer versions and their objective, much technology is involved in the development of those inks to improve print High Quality, longevity, drying speeds and printing speeds and so on. Most inkjet ink is created using dye based ink which can flow easily via the tiny nozzles of the printhead, this kind of ink is great for photos and colour shades but not so great for longevity or solid vibrant color, think of it like a water colour painting. In recent years Pigment Ink technology has superior considerably to enable use in inkjet printing. Previously ink pigments were too big and would block up the nozzles. This type of ink is good for solid colours and longevity, think of it like an oil painting.

Manufacturers like Epson, HP and Jet Tec are now progressively using a fusion of dye dependent and pigmented inks to create excellent quality photo printing with vibrant colours and longevity too.

Inkjet printers use anything between two and eight Ink Cartridges to do their work. Generally speaking the entry-level machines use two cartridges, good all round machines use four and specialist photo printers use six or more. The two Cartridge System functions fine although could be a bit wasteful about the Colour Ink, so go for a four-cartridge program where possible especially if you do colour printing. The six or a lot more cartridge techniques produce outstanding pictures, but can be costly along with a discomfort to keep changing cartridges (printer does not work if any one cartridge is empty).

Inkjet printers are the very best solution for most people and are generally the most price efficient method to print - unless you are printing large volumes.

These printers are small, lightweight and ideal for individuals about the move. Although the printing of higher high quality photographs is usually beyond this type of printer, basic colour printing is of great quality and the quality of text print is mostly outstanding thinking about the size of those tiny portable A4 printers. These printers are not suitable for higher volume printing.

The Inkjet Printer may be the most generally used kind of printer among house and small company users. With excellent all round printing capabilities, from black & white text print and good color prints via to very hi-resolution, higher high quality photographs using Inkjet Photo Printers. Inkjet printers are available from cheap entry degree to high-end business use machines and can print from photo size prints to massive A2 and bigger sizes, there are versions for occasional use and others for higher volume print jobs too. One of the many excellent things about Inkjet printers is that you are able to use a wide variety of media to print on, including standard paper, Photo Paper, card, t-shirt transfers, canvas, projector film and so on, achieving different looks and textures for your prints and print for various purposes. Most Inkjet printers are USB connections and not suitable for networks, although versions are also accessible for networks and with parallel connections.

Multi-Function Inkjet Printers have been built to meet the needs of house offices and small businesses. These superb value machines provide multiple solutions in one compact and easy to use machine i.e. printing, scanning, copying and some also have built in fax machines too. Not just are these machines excellent for saving space on your desk, but they are also very good for printing too utilizing the same technology as standard inkjet printers. The only thing you should be aware of is that you can only use one function at a time and if something goes wrong with an "All-in-one" machine, you might lose the all the functions at once!

Laser printers work inside a similar way to photocopiers, except they use a laser instead of a bright light to scan with. They function by creating an electrostatic image of the page onto a charged photoreceptor, which in turn attracts toner within the shape of an electrostatic charge. Toner is the material utilized to make the image (as ink is in an inkjet printer) and is really a very fine powder, so laser printers use Toner Cartridges instead of ink cartridges.

Laser Printers have traditionally been the best printing solution for heavy office users as they create a really high Quality Black text finish and offer relatively low operating costs. However, laser printers have superior a Great Deal recently and their prices have steadily dropped, as a result you will find now Compact Laser printers, multi-function and colour laser printers all at really inexpensive prices. Laser printers make sense if you need to do a great deal of higher quality black or colour prints, not photos. The excellent thing about a color Laser Printer is that they can print a very great quality colour image on standard copier paper, so you do not have to use expensive photo paper for large jobs. Do check the prices of the consumables before you purchase the printer as these could be very expensive for colour laser printers.

Laser printers are the best solution for individuals who are printing in large volumes, that is, in 100's of pages at a time or 1000's of pages per month. Colour lasers also take quite a while to warm up, so are not ideal for printing single pages.

Solid ink printers use solid wax Ink Sticks inside a "phase-change" process, they function by liquefying wax ink sticks into reservoirs and then squirting the ink onto a transfer drum from wherever it's cold-fused onto the paper in an individual pass. Solid ink printers are marketed almost exclusively by Tektronix / Xerox and are aimed at larger businesses and higher volume colour printing.

Solid ink printers used to be cheaper to buy than similarly specified colour lasers and fairly economical to run owing to a low component usage, today it isn't necessarily any cheaper than a colour laser printer. Output high quality is good but generally not as great as the best color lasers for text and graphics or the best inkjets for photographs. Print speeds are not as fast as most color lasers.

Dye-Sublimation printers use heat and solid colour dyes to create lab-quality photographic images. Dye-Sub printers contain a roll of transparent film made up of page-sized panels of colour, with cyan, magenta, yellow, and Black Dye embedded within the film. Print Head heating elements vaporize the inks, which adhere to a specially coated paper, as the ink cools it re-solidifies about the paper. Color intensity is controlled by precise variations in temperature.

Dye-sublimation printers lay down color in continuous tones One Color at a time instead of dots of ink like an inkjet, because the color is absorbed into the paper instead of sitting on the surface, the output is more photo-realistic, more durable and less vulnerable to fading than other ink systems.

The downside of Dye-Sub printers is that they are generally a lot more expensive to buy and run, generally limited to photo sized prints only and can only print onto a single kind of specialised paper as nicely as being quite slow to print.

Dye-Sublimation printers are best for those who want to link up their digital camera to a objective built printer and print out the finest high quality photos at house without fuss.

Dot matrix printers are relatively old fashioned technologies today with poor quality print, slow and very noisy output. This kind of printer is no longer utilized unless you wish to produce invoices utilizing the continuous paper with holes on both sides. The good thing is that they are very cheap to run!

Numerous printers today are really inexpensive to buy, but people are sometimes shocked to discover the price of replacing the consumables (ink or Laser Cartridges, imaging drums, fuser, oils, specialist papers etc). The cost of replacing the ink can sometimes cost more than the printer itself! This is a single from the most commonly overlooked factors when printers are reviewed and yet one of the most important things to think about before handing over your hard earned cash.

These figures cannot be taken hard and fast due to the numerous variables included, but it is usually accepted that the cost per print of a laser printer is cheaper than that of an inkjet, which is in turn cheaper than that of a sub-dye printer. However, you would have to do a fair amount of colour printing to take advantage of the economy offered by a laser printer.

When buying a printer, firstly carefully think about its use, is it mostly common printing or for photographs, is it for occasional use or higher volumes, will it be a stand alone device or connected to a network? Then using the guideline information above you'll be able to decide on which type of printer is most suitable for you at the time.