Office Printers

Finding a Printer For The Office

Every office that has computers has printers to, they go together like bread and butter. But choosing a printer for your office can become a daunting task, with so much competition out there, it’s getting very confusing. First and foremost it’s important to analyze your needs, so here’s a list of questions you should ask yourself first. 

1. How many people are going to use the printer?
2. How much space do you have for the printer?
3. Do you need scanning facilities?
4. Do you need photocopying?
5. Do you need colour or black and white?
6. Speed. Laser or inkjet?
7. Do you need fax?

There’s a few questions you should be considering before buying a office printer. If you have a serviced office you might get one included in the office space. Frankly speaking printers are quite affordable these days, you can pop into your local PC World and pick one up. Generally every office printer should have the following functionalities:

• Black & white
• Network compatible - So you can share your printer across your network
• Laserjet
• Paper-tray - Preferably 2 paper feeds
• Photocopying facility

From my experience I have always chosen HP printers, they are almost industrial tools for the office. Very reliable, support is fantastic, cartridges are cheap and the price is fair. Saying that your office printer should be a laser, because you can print 20x faster than a inkjet and over time that can save your employees a lot of time. I ideally you would want a all in one printer which has everything, from scanning to fax, but these all in one printers have their disadvantages too. Because you are relying on one machine to operate multiple functions, if it breaks then you’re in trouble. On the plus side of things all in ones are cheaper to buy individually, compact so it saves space and easy to use. You can use the following as a reference to what sort of printer you should buy.

For a company that has 1 to 10 employees:

1x Laser Printer - Black and white, network compatible
1x All-In-One Inkjet Printer - Colour, scanning and photocopying

For a company that has 10 to 30 employees:

1x MFP Printer - mulit-function printer, laser, colour, black and white, network, scan, photocopy

MFP which stands for multi function printer is now a very common choice amongst small businesses. You will find that they are very convenient for companies that use very small amounts of colour and more black and white. It’s also a good practice to find a printer which gives you more prints per cartridge, some cartridges use the “quality over quantity” sequence, hence they are expensive and some are the other way around.