Difference between Ink Tank Printer and Laser Jet Printers

Difference between Ink Tank Printer and Laser Jet Printers

If you're buying a printer, either for work or for home, one of the choices you're likely to be faced is whether to get an inkjet printer or a laser printer. Inkjet printers use liquid ink sprayed through microscopic nozzles onto the paper, and laser printers use a toner cartridge (filled with fine powder) and a heated fuser.

Each technology has its own strengths and weaknesses. The two types use different approaches and each is appropriate for meeting different printing needs.

Initial costs

Surprisingly enough, you can purchase a basic laser or inkjet printer for almost the same price. If you're looking for a budget multifunction printer -- which will include the ability to photocopy and scan images as well as print -- there's not much difference in price between inkjets like the Canon PIXMA MX350 and lasers like the Dell 1133. One distinct difference between these two models, however, is that only the inkjet model can print colour pages — budget laser printers are only capable of producing black-and-white documents.

Ongoing costs

As you continue to use your new printer over a period of time, you'll need to keep it supplied with appropriate consumables like paper and ink or toner. The ongoing running costs of printers are generally quoted in cents per A4 page. You can calculate this by dividing the number of pages an ink or toner cartridge can produce (this figure is provided by the manufacturer) by the price of the cartridge. This doesn't include the cost of paper though (but this won't change depending on the type of printers).

Generally inkjet printers have a price per page of around 20 cents, although this includes both black and colour cartridges — if you intend to print only black, ongoing print costs are generally 7-8 cents per page. Cheap black-and-white laser printers have a price of around 6c per page on average. If you spend more on a laser printer, the cost per page generally drops quickly.

Larger laser printers have additional ongoing costs when compared to inkjets: they often require an additional fuser cartridge or the replacement of parts with a maintenance kit.

Print speed and text print quality

When it comes to printing black and white text pages, laser printing is unbeatable. Even in low-end cheaper monochrome laser models you can expect print speeds of up to 20 pages per minute. Inkjets are significantly slower, with budget printers rarely printing more than 6 pages per minute of black text.

For normal print sizes (of around 12pt and larger) text printing quality is similar between both laser and inkjet printing platforms. However, if your printing needs include printing small fonts then lasers are normally superior to inkjets, as the fusing technology better lends itself to the minute curves and dots of small text.

WINDOWS 8 LIKES

      

Windows 8 brings significant advantages to those who are upgrading existing PCs or purchasing new ones, thanks to features that better take advantage of the new OS's capabilities. The operating system offers improvements in performance, existing capabilities, and is cheaper. Finally, the world has had a chance to weigh in on it, and some solid improvements are just around the corner in Windows 8.1. For an in-depth look at the OS, read my review of Windows 8, but here are a few of features that make upgrading worthwhile.


SkyDrive integration.  Microsoft's cloud service has become way, way more than just online storage. Sure, it still lets you save and access files to an online space that's accessible from a Web browser or apps that run on not only Windows, but also Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. But with Windows 8, SkyDrive is accessible to any app that wants to use it, just as though it were a local drive. It also backs up your PC's settings, letting you replicate your environment should you get a new PC.

App Store

Finally, a number of IT shops have expressed an interest in living under Apple's App store and a fear of Android's largely because of the number of malware apps that have appeared in that ecosystem. Microsoft's Windows 8 app store is a blend of the best practices of both, providing the willingness of the Android products for application breadth and the curation of the Apple store assuring a malware-free environment. This best-of-both-worlds approach may make it easier for line managers to use this store to QC their code and for IT to get out of the middle of the process much like many do with the Apple App Store. In addition, the process the app goes through during approval is reported back and anomalies can be more quickly addressed as a result, assuring a more timely release of the related code.

In short, this might be a way for IT to pass responsibility over to Microsoft while still maintaining a high quality level on the custom applications. Better and cheaper are seldom seen together and should be well received.