Picking the right printer is tough. Just look at the choices, brands, types, speeds, feeds, functions. It’s enough to make your head spin. But if you follow a few simple guidelines, you will end up with a good printer, that does what you want, for a good price. So let’s get started.

What kind of printing do you want to do? This is important because some printers do an OK job at everything whilst other do a great job at one thing and a poor job at another. Example: If all you do is pictures and portraits, you would be better off with a dedicated portrait printer. But a dedicated portrait printer does a terrible job of printing letters and spreadsheets. So if you do a lot of portraits AND a lot of letters and spreadsheets, you may be better off with two printers, a dedicated portrait printer and a general purpose printer.

Multi Function Printers: Standard printers can do a good job (not great) at portraits too. But you might also want to scan pages and pictures, make copies, or even fax. In fact, the price of multi function printer have come down so much that it might make more sense to by one of these instead of a general purpose printer. And we don’t even print pictures anymore. We proudly display them on our TV and Cell Phones.

Speed and Volume: The two go hand-in-hand, and has a great impact on the type of printer that you should buy. Buy a cheap printer, run a lot of paper through it, and it will burn out quickly. So look and the amount of printing that you plan to do each month, and pick a printer that will meet or reasonably exceed that volume.

Ink Jet VS Laser: Ink Jet is great for low to medium volume printers, but the two technologies are beginning to overlap. Laser printers will handle a lot more volume, but the laser cartridges are much more expense than ink jet. However, cartridge for cartridge, the laser cartridge may yield a lower price per printout or page. However, shelf life of both laser and ink jet is about a year. After that, the cartridge may fail, or ever worse, it may foul and ruin your printer. So part of the choice between Laser and Ink Jet goes back to the volume printed. For really big volume print jobs, don’t burn out your printer, use a printing service.

Do You Really Need Color? Guaranteed, as soon as you buy that black ‘n’ white printer, you’ll need color. Buy a color printer

Paper output is a considerations too. Most low-end printers do standard 8 ½” by 11” only. More expensive printer can do letter, legal, 11” by 17”, may have multiple paper drawers, sorters, collators, and ever staplers. Fancy huh – expensive too.

How will you connect to the printer? The options are USB, WiFI (Wireless), Wired Ethernet, FireWire (Apple) and Blue Tooth. Just make sure your printer will connect the way you want it too. USB, Wired Ethernet, and FireWire are the most reliable.

Best Buys on Printers: I always wait until the end of a product cycle and buy the printer I want at a close-out price. The multi function printer I have now was $795.00 when it first hit the stores, but I got it on close-out for $59.95. You can find great deals on printer on the internet, but you have to pay $10-$20 for shipping. Many of the larger stores will match online price. Don’t be afraid to ask for a discount.

Ink is Ink and Toner is Toner: My printer has 4 ink cartridges and the “Big Computer Store” wanted $24.99 each. Darn! That’s more than I paid for the printer. I would have been better off buying a new printer! So I went down the street to a “generic brand” ink cartridge store and got all 4 cartridges for $10.99. What a sweet deal!

It sound like a lot but you can do it. Decide what you want to do with the printer, how much printing, then scourer the internet to compare specs, reviews, and deals, and you’ll make a good choice.