Best Printers For Home and Home Office

Best Printers For Home and Home Office

The drivers for procuring best home printer as against home office are moderately different. While, it is assumed, that a printing at home would essentially be for personal or family use - it essentially addresses a non-commercial need. However, within a home office environment, it could be for a single or multiple people and is surely being used for commercial reasons. Having stated the difference, the fact remains that there is commonality of purpose as well; this is value for money and multifunction need.

Historically, the printing industry has evolved a lot. Needless to mention, it has been able to match pace with the changing technologies (Internet, wireless etc) as well as improvise on quality and resolution and performance. Right from dot matrix printer days to modern day all-in-one laser ones - there has been a world of difference. The new era of home device is no longer just a printer as it can also scan, fax, is a network device, is wireless, can accept photos from memory cards, and are Bluetooth enabled. What's more - with an ever dipping cost and increased reliability and serviceability, the best breed are getting more and more affordable to the common person.

Color Printer

Let us look the home printers. Their needs could be to print documents (often not too many pages and therefore very high performance is not the most important criteria), scan pictures, fax documents and do all this while having low maintenance and low cost of replacing toner or ink cartridge as needed. Network ability may not be an essential selection parameter. As a buyer for the best home machine, one should evaluate the following parameters, in no specific order, before the purchase:

1.     Compactness
2.     Speed
3.     Quality
4.     Maintainability (check if drums need to be replaced every time a toner is changed)
5.     Scanning (multiple page scan etc) and faxing ease
6.     Ability to take multiple input paper types (in set-up)
7.     Wireless ability (if you prefer your room less cluttered with wires)

Popular best home devices under US$ 100 can be the Dell V-305 inkjet, and the HP Laserjet P1006. All are easy to set up as well. The Dell V-305 is fast, scans copies and is all-in-one device at an affordable cost. The HP Laserjet P1006 is good for light and medium home use and the toner can produce 1500 good quality pages at up to 17 pages per minute.

Home office printers have different need set and assuming a small to medium sized home office - the following are the essential attributes:

1.     Ability to produce color pages
2.     Should be able to load more than 200 pages
3.     Speed should be high
4.     Should be able to make business card
5.     Obviously be a network and preferably a wireless
6.     Should publish double sided pages
7.     Good if cost is under US$ 600

One of the Best home office machines is the HP Color LaserJet CP2025x. It prints 21 pages per minute. Cartridge life is for 10000 pages. It has easy sharing via built-in networking. Canon-Pixma can be another good option and it has all in one photo print/scan/copy. It can turn out up to 19 ppm in black, up to 15 ppm in color. Epson-Stylus color multifunction print/scan/copy can turn out up to 24 ppm in black and up to 14 in color. One can also check out Samsung-Network ready multifunction machine which can print 21 ppm and has a built Ethernet 10/100Base-TX interface. The speed of all these machines varies with use.

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