Which is better to buy a printer for home use: laser or inkjet?

Every year the range of printing devices is only expanding: new models with more and more diverse functionality appear, and periodically and fundamentally new developments. A buyer deciding which printer to buy for home use can find in the store the device that suits him best both in terms of capabilities and wallet.

It is clear that characteristics such as the ability to print in large quantities, the reliability and cost-effectiveness of a printer working in the home and office are always important, but not equally everywhere. Therefore, the question of how to choose the right printer should always be associated with the features of its further use.

Types of home printers

Laser printer

A consumable material in a laser printer is a finely dispersed soot, which is refilled with a cartridge. The signal is processed by the printed circuit board and directed by a laser beam to the photoconductor, on which a static voltage arises, attracting the powder in accordance with the transmitted image. The photodrum, when rolling paper, leaves powder on it along with the picture. Then a thermal roller heated to 200 degrees is rolled over the paper, which welds the soot to the paper.

The resulting image is not afraid of moisture and fading, in this sense, the choice of which is better to buy a laser or inkjet printer is clearly in favor of the first.

Laser printers are the ideal technique for printing tables and texts on any plain paper. But they are not suitable for printing high-quality images, since modern laser technology is not yet capable of this. The advantage of a laser printer is:

• large capacity cartridges, enough for 1.5-2 thousand pages of plain text;
• ease of maintenance;
• high print speed.

The disadvantages include the solid cost of consumables and high (up to 300 W) energy consumption.

LED printer

It uses a technology similar to that used by laser printers, but instead of a laser, it uses a ribbon with thousands of LEDs.

Video on which printer to buy for home use

Jet printer

This device requires ink to print. Here, under pressure from the microscopic nozzles of the print head, ink is fired from the cartridge. The necessary pressure is created in two ways:

• in thermal inkjet printing by heating ink (used by HP, Lexmark, Canon);
• in piezoelectric printing by fluctuations in the size of the print head chamber (Epson).

Inkjet printers are a common solution to the question of how to choose a color printer for home use. They are universal, they can print both text and images equally well. But their disadvantages are the low resource of the cartridge, the high cost of printing, and with a long downtime, the ink dries up.

sublimation printer

If the question is which printer to choose for high-quality photo printing, then you should look at sublimation options. Here, a solid-state dye is applied to photographic paper. Between the latter and the heating element there is a film with dyes of three colors. When the film is heated, the ink evaporates, and its vapors penetrate into the pores of the photographic paper that have opened from heating. After cooling, the pores close and hold the ink firmly. Printing usually takes place in three stages, each of which is applied to one of the colors. This technology allows you to get very high-quality photographs, but their cost is too high due to the low resource of the cartridge.

Summarizing the above, we can conclude which printer to buy for home use: here it is advisable to choose from inkjet, laser or LED, since the user often needs universal devices. And the operation of a sublimation printer will cost a pretty penny. This is the main thing to know when choosing a printer.

Choosing Between Inkjet and Laser Printers

It is between them that in most cases the choice is made. For printing monochrome documents, a laser printer will undoubtedly be the best. There are, of course, color laser models, but their operation will be too expensive. For example, if the device itself costs 8,000 rubles, then a set of original consumables (cartridges) will result in 20,000. Not everyone will be able to pay such a serious amount for the ability to replicate color pictures. For a black and white printer, you will need a cartridge worth 5,000 rubles.

The text on a laser printer prints perfectly, the font looks at the typographical level, it does not fade or wash off with water. Although it is possible to print drawings and photographs on a laser printer, their quality is very mediocre. But even if there are no special requirements for the quality of photographs, it is still worth remembering that their cost will turn out to be unreasonably high.

Here are the reasons to choose a laser or LED printer:

• the need to print large volumes of documents;
• sufficiency of monochrome printing;
• irregular work with long downtime;
• no need to print photos.

If, in addition to plain text, you often need to print photos, then you should think about which multifunction printer to buy. And the best will be an inkjet printer that perfectly prints any image on a variety of types of paper, envelopes, film, CDs. By default, any inkjet printer is color because it has separate monochrome and color cartridges. The development of the quality of inkjet printers has allowed them to approach laser devices in terms of cartridge resource and print speed. Now their purchase may turn out to be no less economical, since the prices for consumables are equalized. The continuous printing system especially helps to increase the resource of the cartridge, with it it becomes very cheap to print a sheet on an inkjet printer. So, you should choose an inkjet printer if:

• color printing is required;
• Need to print high quality images?
• you need to print images on film, laser discs, etc.