| Which Inkjet Printer should I buy?
Before you buy any printer we advise you to consider the following factors:
COST OF INK CARTRIDGES
Make sure that the cartridges used in the printer are easily obtained and do not cost too much. See the guide to Ink Cartridges for further details of how to save on your ink cartridges.
IMAGE QUALITY
The other most important factor is the Image Quality. The quality of the printed image depends on the quality of the source image. Decide what you want your pictures for. A picture that will be look at closely needs high resolution. A picture that will be hung on a wall does not need to be so sharp. Resolution is measured in dots per inch (DPI), which are how many individual dots a printer can print next to each other on a line one inch long. This is, however just one of the factors that decides how good an inkjet or Laser printers output is. Most printer manufacturers today employ many picture enhancement techniques and offer photo-cartridges with more colours of ink to improve print quality. Epson has a series of printers that print at a very high 5760 dpi, but be aware that printing at such a resolution can be a very slow process and that you will want to use expensive high quality paper to get the most out of such printer. It's also important not to ignore other factors of a printer’s usability, such as speed, build quality, noise level and running costs.
PRINTER SPEED
The speed of a printer is given in pages per minute or sometimes for slow colour printers, minutes per page. Take the numbers advertised by the manufacturers with a pinch of salt as they are invariably measured with the printer printing at a low resolution and thus don't show how fast it is at printing at high quality.
INKJET PRINTER COMPARISON
Hewlett Packard has the best reputation for quality but are usually expensive to maintain. Epson printers provide the ultimate in print quality at a good price. There is however some doubt about quality, but that’s taken care of by Epson’s excellent warranty service and continuously improving technology. If it's high quality output you want at an economic price, this is it.
No matter which brand of inkjet printer you go for, we would recommend that you don't buy the cheapest model in the range - moving up to the second cheapest often brings very worthwhile improvements. Don't buy the latest newest model either. The chances are that there will not be any cheap cartridges available for it for several months. Beware of "Bargains". Recently printers are being sold at prices that are the same as (or less than) the cost of the cartridges they contain.
Read the other articles in this section to help you develop a complete understanding of what inkjet printing is all about.
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