Printers - reviews and price comparison

Type

There are two main categories of printers; laserjet (to the right in the picture) and inkjet printers (to the left). (Show more on printer types) Inkjet printers are in general great for printing pictures in colour, and this is why certain photo printers have been developed with this technology. Both types of printers (inkjet and laserjet) can provide similar quality in printing text.

If the printer is rarely used the liquid ink in the inkjet printers can dry and stop up the printer heads. The consequence of this can be that you have to change cartridges even though it is not empty. This problem won’t occur with laserjet printers since they use powder toner.
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Laserjet printers are in general more expensive to buy and more bulky but cheaper to run.

Operating costs

A print-out with a laserjet printer usually costs approximately half as much as with an inkjet printer. The printing costs vary a lot between different manufacturers and models. We recommend you to read the test reviews to get an idea of if a printer is cheap or expensive in operation costs. (Show more on ink and toner) Toner and ink

Colour laserjet printers have a toner cassette for each colour; four cassettes in total. A toner cassette for black colour usually costs about £ 40-100 and lasts for 2000-6000 pages. The price depends on how many printings the cassette can last for, but the price also varies between manufacturers and models. Colour toners cost a couple of tens more than black in general.
As a comparative figure for how long a toner cassette lasts the number of A4 pages with 5% cover is indicated. With normal usage the toner cassette runs out faster.

Inkjet cartridges are often made in black and 3-colour cartridges respectively. They cost about £ 10-40 and lasts for 200-800 pages. The amount of photo print-outs is much lower; 50-200 cards in 10x15cm format. Some inkjet printers have 3 (or more) separate cartridges for the colours. The cost per print-out is about the same for those.

The table below shows approximate cost examples for an A4 page with a laserjet- and an inkjet printer. Note that these prices vary a lot between manufacturers and models and can be both higher and lower than what the table states.

Drums (laserjet printers)

Laserjet printers use a drum to transfer the toner to the paper. The drum is consumed and needs to be replaced. Many printers for domestic use utilize toner cassettes with a built-in drum and with these you don’t have to change the drum separately.
Colour laserjet printers use one drum per colour, which means four drums in total. A drum lasts for 3.000 to 100.000 prints depending on manufacturer and model.
The price range is wide, from £50 to £400, depending on how many print-outs the drum last for.
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Colour/Black & white

If you don't print in colour you can save money on buying a black&white laserjet printer. The purchase will only cost marginally more than an inkjet printer and it is usually cheaper to run.

Summary:

	Inkjet	Colour laserjet	B/W laserjet
Buying price
Operating costs
Size
Suitable for photo
Suitable for text
Maintenance

Type

Which type of printer are you looking for?
Not important Inkjet (colour) Colour laserjet Laser jet (colour or b/w)

Photo printing

Today there are certain printers intended for printing pictures with photo quality. Many of these photo printers also support PictBridge, which means that you can print directly from a digicam with PictBridge without having to first transfer the pictures to a computer.

Other printers have memory card readers, which enable print-out directly from the digicam’s memory card.

Printing speed

Something worth consideration if you print many and/or large documents, is the printing speed. The printing speed is indicated in pages per minute.

If you mostly print short documents or single pages the time it takes to print the first page can matter.

If a laserjet printer has been switched off or in energy saving mode it takes a certain time before the printing can start. However some new laserjet printers don’t need any start-up time before starting to print.

Resolution

The printer’s resolution indicates how detailed printings it can handle. The resolution is specified in Dots Per Inch (dpi). 600 dpi gives you good text printings and pictures, but for photo printing 1200 dpi or more is recommended.

Noise

Some printers can be quite noisy when printing. If it is important with a silent printer, read more. Sound/noise levels are measured in decibel (dB) and a printer usually lies somewhere between 35 and 70 dB, which represents a large scope since the scale is logarithmic. 50 dB is said to be the decibel rating of a normal conversation.

The following audio file illustrates how big the difference 10 dB makes. The files contain noise in three different sound volumes with 10 dB difference between each step. The first sound is 30 dB louder than the last one. How many decibels the sounds are played with of course depends on how loud your computer can play them, the difference between the sounds are however still 10 dB.
Play noise

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Connections

Traditionally printers have been connected to the computer’s printer port (the parallel port), but nowadays most printers use USB. If you are printing large graphic documents it can be good to check that the printer has a USB 2.0 port, which enables a faster transfer than with USB 1.1. This requires that the connected computer also has a USB 2.0 port.

USB port	Parallel/printer port

Many printers have, or can be optionally equipped with, network connection. This makes it easier to use the same printer to several computers in a network. Some printers have the possibility to connect to wireless networks (WLAN). Some printers have built-in Bluetooth or as additional choice, which lets you print documents wirelessly from devices equipped with Bluetooth.

Additional features

Some laserjet printers have the possibility to automatically make double sided printings (duplex). Useful and paper-saving.

Paper thickness

Different printers can handle different paper thicknesses, depending on how they are constructed. The thickness is usually measured in the paper’s weight. Regular paper usually has a thickness of 80 g/m² while photo papers measure from 150 g/m² and often 200 g/m² or more.

Rating/awards

On testwinner.co.uk all the different ratings given by expert testers have been translated into a percentage from 0 to 100 with 100 being the maximum rating.
The average rating for a product can indicate different things. A low average rating is a warning that the product maybe won't live up the expectations created by the ads for the product. A high rating often means that the product has great features and works well. The more tests of the product the better accuracy in the average rating.

The amount of test wins/awards shows how many times the product has been named winner or been selected "Editor's Choice", "Best Buy" or received similar positive awards in tests. An award means that the product stands out from the competition in one way or another. It can be by giving value for money or by being innovative, or simply by just filling its purpose in a really good way.