Buyer's Guide: Inkjet Printers

If you're running a workgroup, small enterprise or home office and considering printers for your business, you might exclude inkjet printers from your deliberations. That's because it's easy to be blinded by the cult of the laser printer.

Don't misunderstand -- for heavy-duty office work, an industrial-strength laser is an undeniable asset. But certain types of users -- graphics pros and desktop publishers, for instance -- may find an inkjet printer more useful than a hulking laser.

Canon Pixma iX7000

In general, if your priority is speed for large volumes of text documents, a laser printer is the way to go. But if price and graphics quality are important to you, don't overlook inkjets. Colors from inkjet printers are generally brighter and more vibrant than colors from lasers. And even though the price of color laser printers has been dropping, inkjets remain the most economical solution for tasks that beg for color.

Economical? Aren't inkjet printers an infamous example of razors-and-blades marketing, with low purchase prices offset by the cost of replacement ink cartridges? Well, to some extent. That's why it's smart to check the price of replacement cartridges before you buy any printer, to avoid unpleasant surprises.

But don't confuse under-$40, disposable consumer inkjets with today's office-class products and their high-capacity cartridges. And don't think that lasers don't play the razors-and-blades game, too.

The price of any printer before you take it out of the box is soon outweighed by the cost per page once you start operating the unit. Figuring that should be easy -- you take the price of a cartridge, or cartridges for a color page, and divide it by the number of pages produced. That used to be problematic because how page yields were measured varied from manufacturer to manufacturer. However, yield numbers have become more comparable since standards for producing them were implemented by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

Typically, the per-page costs for office inkjet printers are in the 1.5 to 3.5 cents range for black-and-white pages and in the 5.5 to 9.5 cents range for color. The latter is less than you'll pay for color pages from an entry-level color laser -- in some cases, substantially less. Epson's B-510DN, a bit of an anomaly as an everyday-document rather than photo-and-publishing specialist among inkjets, uses jumbo ink cartridges to drive its color page cost as low as 3.5 cents.

Those numbers, of course, can vary based on a number of factors, including the quality of the output you demand from a printer. Higher quality means more ink per page, depleting printer cartridges more quickly.

Cartridge Details

Some inkjet printers have all their colors in a single cartridge, but they're found at the low end of the spectrum and aren't suitable for office work. Most have at least four cartridges -- the same quartet of black, yellow, cyan and magenta seen in color lasers. Some Canon printers have a fifth cartridge -- photo black -- and Epson's Stylus Photo R1900 has eight, including red and orange. Extra cartridges are used primarily to improve the quality of photos pumped out by the printer.

Since most printer output in the office isn't stuff that will be cherished by posterity, the debate over pigment- versus dye-based inks probably won't concern you. However, if there's an archival element to your business, you should be familiar with the issue.

HP Officejet 7000

In a nutshell, pigment inks last longer. They don't run when wet and their colors don't fade over time. They also dry faster and don't bleed as much at the edges of their colors. Dye-based inks, on the other hand, have higher brilliance and contrast, offer a wider color gamut and are less expensive to produce. And "last longer," by the way, is a relative term. Epson, for example, claims photos printed with its dye inks won't fade for 200 years if placed in dark storage.

Look Sharp

If you produce lots of lengthy documents, an inkjet printer's speed will be a game breaker for you. Nevertheless, inkjet speeds have increased in recent times. Although speeds can vary widely, you can expect high-speed or draft-mode monochrome output to be in the 30 pages per minute ballpark, with color printing peaking at around 20 ppm. Many vendors now advertise, in addition to these maximum speeds, more credible high-quality or laser-quality speeds (usually about half of the draft page count).

The rule of thumb used to be that text from an inkjet printer was clearly inferior to a laser's. But with improving technology, the distinction in text quality between the two types of printers has blurred. For most document tasks, inkjets can provide more than adequate quality and for photographic tasks, superior quality.

Typically, inkjets deliver higher resolutions than laser printers. That's why inkjets are the darlings of photographers. A common resolution found on lasers is 600 by 600 dots per inch, or 1,200 by 1,200 dpi at most. Inkjets use those resolutions, too, but only for black-and-white text; color graphics are commonly printed at resolutions like 4,800 by 1,200 dpi, 5,760 by 1,440 dpi or 9,600 by 2,400 dpi.

Of course, higher resolutions can have an impact on printer speed. For example, the HP Officejet Pro 8000, which has a top resolution of 4,800 by 1,200, is rated at 34 color pages per minute while the Canon Pixma iP3600, with a max res of 9,600 by 2,400 dpi, is rated at 17 color ppm.

Another contributor to inkjet quality is the size of the ink droplets used by the printer. Those droplets are measured in picoliters. Just a scant five years ago, printer makers were boasting about what wonderful documents they could create with their 30-picoliter printheads. Today, printers use droplets in the two- to four-picoliter range and can achieve very smooth results on a page.

The way a printer puts its ink on a page is worth considering, too. Most inkjets have thermal printheads, which heat ink to form bubbles that are fired onto the paper. One manufacturer, though, Epson, uses what it calls micro piezo technology to deliver ink, placing piezoelectric elements over each nozzle in the printhead. When the elements change shape, they force the ink droplets to the paper. That, according to Epson, allows the size of the droplets to be more precisely controlled, which improves print quality, and also extends the life of its printheads.

Paper Handling

Another consideration when mulling over the purchase of an inkjet is how it handles paper. In an office environment, you'll probably want a high-capacity paper tray -- at least 250 sheets, perhaps with a second tray to cut down on time spent refilling or switching paper. You can put letterhead in one tray, for example, and plain or photo paper in the other.

Epson WorkForce 1100

Letter- and legal-sized paper are the bread and butter of today's inkjets, but it's substantially easier to find an inkjet than a laser printer that can handle larger media such as 11 by 17-inch tabloid paper (enough for a two-page desktop-publishing spread). HP's Officejet 7000 is such a model. Epson's WorkForce 1100 and Canon's Pixma iX7000 stretch to accommodate 13 by 19-inch stock. Check a candidate's specs if you need to print on special media such as card stock, transparencies, banners, or CDs and DVDs.

Another paper-handling feature you may find useful is duplex printing. It lets you print on both sides of a sheet, saving time as well as paper.

Who will be using a printer also needs to be included in your decision matrix. Even in a two-person office, you'll want a way to share the printer. That means a way to connect it to your network -- either through Ethernet or Wi-Fi.

Inkjet printers are no longer a poor relative of lasers. While lasers remain the kings of high speed and high volume, in every other area, inkjets have narrowed the gap or surpassed laser quality. That's particularly the case in photographic printing, although inkjets optimized for photographic output are less suited for other office tasks than more general-purpose models. For business users with welterweight printing demands, inkjets remain a solid alternative to the office laser.