Is Inkjet Printer a right choice for printing?

Inkjet printers have become the standard for home-computer use. Consider maintenance ink usage rating, which reflects the extra ink used by an inkjet printer to maintain its print heads during light, intermittent use. Shop around for the best cartridge prices, but be wary of off-brands.

This saves you an extra step and a little time. Features such as a memory-card reader, PictBridge support (a standard that allows a compatible camera to be connected directly to the printer), or a wireless interface are convenient. Without the computer, though, you lose the ability to tweak image characteristics such as size, color, and brightness. You can do some editing on a printer that has an LCD screen, but your options will be very limited.

Inkjets can make borderless prints like those from a photo finisher. That matters most if you’re printing to the full size of the paper, as you might with 4×6-inch sheets. If you plan to use 4×6-inch paper regularly, look for a printer with a 4×6-inch tray or a second paper tray, which makes it easier to feed paper this size. With those small sheets, though, the cost per photo might be higher than combining a few images on 8½x11-inch paper.

All printers have a USB port for connecting to a computer. Many also offer wired or wireless networking, which lets you print from any computer on your network. You can share a printer that lacks this feature, but the computer it’s connected to must be turned on in order to print from a different computer.

While inkjet printers use a computer’s memory to process the print job, laser printers have their own onboard memory, which must be large enough to hold full pages of the most complex graphics you need to print. If you print large files with a lot of graphics or have multiple users on your network, look for a laser with at least hundreds of MB of onboard memory, or the ability to add more.

When shopping for a printer, you’ll notice a number of specs, such as print speed and resolution. Those numbers are not all that useful, even for comparison purposes, because each company performs its tests in a different manner.

Print speed varies depending on what you’re printing and at what quality, but the speeds you see in ads are generally higher than you’re likely to get in normal use. You can’t reliably compare speeds for different brands because each company uses its own methods to measure speed. A printer’s resolution, expressed in dots per inch, is another potential source of confusion. All things being equal, the more dots a printer puts on the paper, the more detailed the image. But dot size, shape, and placement also affect quality, so don’t base your choice solely on resolution.