Ink Jet Printers

Ink jet printers are a great purchase for people on a tight budget. With prices starting at less than $50 bucks, how can you go wrong? The best ink jet printers are built well, reasonably fast and produce good quality prints.

The clear advantage to owning an inkjet printer versus a laser printer is high quality photos. Ink jet printers are much more precise at outputting high quality images than a laser printer. The price you pay for producing quality image prints on an ink jet printer, is speed.

Print times are very slow on an ink jet printer especially if you only purchase a mid priced model. If you print photographs quite often, it might be wise to spend a little more on your ink jet printer, you’ll save a lot of printing time.

Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Canon and Lexmark are the leading ink jet printer manufacturers. The best ink jet printer reviews are always focused on one of these world ink jet leaders as producing the best product for consumers.

Print speed and performance has always been a sore spot for ink jet printers. Manufacturers always make unrealistic speed claims, basing them on draft printing mode, which cuts corners on output quality. So don't compare ink jet speeds when making your against those for laser printers, which really can print at their claimed speeds.

Another manufacturer claim you shouldn't take too seriously is resolution, which doesn't tell you everything you need to know about print quality. For example, you won't get laser-quality text and graphics from an ink jet, even though the ink jet offers the same or higher resolution, because the ink tends to spread, or wick, as the paper absorbs it. Laser printers are best if your use your printer for mostly text, lines and small graphics.

You should consider total cost of ownership for any printer, and particularly for ink jets. Essentially, manufacturers give away the razor to sell the blades. The initial cost of a printer may be low, but continually feeding it ink and photo paper gets pricey. To calculate total cost of ownership, consider how many pages you'll print over the printer's lifetime (about three years), then multiply the total by the best estimate you can find for the printer's cost per page (usually available from the manufacturer).

The more you print, the more likely that the total cost will be higher for a bargain printer than for a more expensive one. Remember that if your ink jet printer uses a tricolor ink cartridge, you have to throw out the entire cartridge when any color runs out. That tends to make printers with separate-color ink cartridges less expensive to run.

Don't rely on the claimed resolution. Instead, try to see some photo samples before you buy. And although you can add network connections to most printers, ink jet printer installation is cumbersome. The one notable exception is HP printers, which take advantage of the same easy installation routine that HP's network laser printers use.