What’s the Most Commonly Used Type of Business Printer?

If you’re looking at a business printer for your office, what type should you consider? The two common types are either inkjet or laser technology. 

We have been selling office technology for over a decade, and we can help you make the decision that will work best for your office.

In this article we will cover when inkjet and laser printers are used and the benefits and limitations of each of these technologies.

Inkjet Business Printers

Inkjet printers have been popular for nearly 30 years. Typically, at the lower end of hardware pricing, inkjet is very appealing to most users. They see a cost of $100 and compare that to laser devices with more expensive price tags, and decide it’s better to get an inkjet printer.

Using an inkjet printer can end up hurting a company that does a lot of color printing, especially for brochures. One thing to understand is most inkjet printers cost about 25 cents for a color page with 20% coverage. A lot of flyers run three or four times this amount of color. You can easily see the cost get close to $1 a page if you are not paying close attention. If you did 300 or 500 color brochures a month, it would get ugly. The more color you do, the more an inkjet printer can cause issues.

Another application where inkjet printers can struggle is where the prints are exposed to sunshine. If the ink isn’t UV-resistant, then it tends to change colors and look bad quickly.

Laser Printers

Laser printers are by far the most common printing technology used when both quality and cost-per-print are factored in. You will often see HP or Xerox copiers and printers that use laser technology. These work well for most companies, because they are fast, and their cost-per-print is so much cheaper than an inkjet printer.

Laser printers are generally between 30 and 60 pages per minute. This makes a bigger difference when there is full color, because the inkjet printer can slow down to five pages a minute, while the laser printer will keep going at the fastest speed.

Laser printers are what a business should be looking at if you do a lot of printing and especially if you print a lot of documents. The basic rule of thumb is if you print more than 100 color prints a month or 1,000 black-and-white prints, then a laser printer makes more sense.

We Can Help

For those getting an inkjet printer, we may not be the best fit. However, a lot of our clients have inkjet printers for specific applications. We can help you get a laser printer that will work for your business for years to come. 

We take the time to learn what you need and then give you options that make sense for the application you plan to print. We can help anywhere in the USA!