Planning on buying a printer but wondering which printing technology is right for you? Then read on.
What's important here is what purpose you will use this printer for. Will you print frequently or occasionally? Is black and white printing sufficient for you or will you also print colors and possibly photos? First you need to decide if you should get an inkjet printer or a laser printer. Let's look at the features of these two printing technologies.
Inkjet Printers can be categorized as 3-color inkjet printers, 4-color inkjets and photo printing inkjet printers. The 4-color inkjet printers are the most popular ones in the printing industry.
4-color Inkjet Printers usually hold two ink cartridges (one for black and one for color). Some hold two additional ink cartridges to separate the colors and have one ink cartridge for each color (black, cyan, magenta and yellow).
3-color Inkjet Printers are usually equivalent to the low-end 4 color inkjet printers with the exception of holding only one ink cartridge at a time. So you need to switch the ink cartridge to change between black and color. The 3-color inkjet printers are no longer popular as the 4-color inkjet printer prices are continually dropping.
The photo printing inkjet printers are a bit more complicated than the first two. Many of the 4-color inkjets print photos with good quality and most photo printing inkjets carry the same features as 4-color inkjets with just a few special photo printing features added such as directly printing from the digital camera. Most of the photo printing inkjets use additional colors such as light cyan light magenta, green, and red to provide true photographic quality outputs.
Laser Printers have two different technologies for black & white (monochrome) and color printing. Among the laser printers, monochrome laser printers are the most popular ones in the industry. Generally, laser printers are faster than inkjet printers. Laser printers are quite popular as they offer fast printing, good print quality and low cost per page. They use toner cartridges instead of ink cartridges found in inkjet printers.
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