In normal times companies didn't have an issue with overspending for equipment, consumables or even vacations for their employees. Now that things are not so peachy anymore it seems like even top companies are taking some serious measures to control and reduce costs.

This is why if small offices are considering the acquisition of a printer, it probably results in a search for the cheapest color laser printer they can find. Because of this, the Samsung CLP-315 seems to be selling a lot. While the CLP-315 is a color laser printer, it also manages to be everything that most color laser printers aren't, small, light and affordable. At this point you could probably find one for a bit under $200.

As mentioned before, the Samsung CLP-315 is smaller than most color laser printers and many mono laser printers as well. Ideal for a small office or home office (though only fit for a single user) it comes with a rounded robust design and a shell that makes use of both matte and glossy plastic. The control panel includes a single button that can be used to cancel a print job.

Also on the control panel are the six LED lights that indicate ink running low, power on etc. The only way to connect this printer is through USB. The USB port can be found on the back of the CLP-315. If the user must have Ethernet or WiFi then Samsung is selling an improved version as well, the CLP-315W that can do both. To keep the weight down, the CLP-315 was only equipped with a paper drawer of 150 sheets. But if slightly more is required, an optional extra 150 sheet paper tray can be bought as well.


Setting up the CLP-315 is extremely easy. The printer ships with the cartridges inside. Even if it didn't, the vertical alignment of the printer cartridges right underneath the front cover of the printer makes inserting or replacing either of them extremely easy. Installing the software is also very fast and problem-free. As soon as you're done with that and you've connected the printer through USB you're ready to start printing.

But the two most important details about a laser office printer are speed and quality. When it comes to speed, the CLP-315 is decent for monochrome but rather lousy for color printing. One of the options Samsung had to cut some costs and keep this printer affordable was the use of four-pass printing. This means that four passes are made on the paper, one for each individual toner color.

This obviously led to very low printing speeds in the case of color, of only 4 pages per minute. For black, the CLP-315 can manage to squeeze about 16 pages per minute. So what about the quality of the cheapest color laser printer you can find on the market at this point? Black text doesn't impress very much, but what does is the color graphics the CLP-315 can produce. The quality of graphics is actually better than what most color lasers can offer. For a printer this small and affordable, it's quite amazing.

Most users are very familiar with two types of color photo printers, ones that print through inkjet technology and the other category, dye-sublimation printers. Even if these two technologies are the most encountered on the market, a third one is slowly trying to fit and serve as good competition as well

The zink technology was announced in Decambet 2007 and actually raised a few eyebrows from interested users. What makes zink printers different and interesting is that they use no ink. Zink actually stands for zero ink. This is because these inkless printers support special paper that includes numerous tiny crystals of different colors (the main colors you find as ink in other types of printers, cyan, magenta and yellow).

Because the print head heats up, it manages to melt the crystals on the paper and transform them into the desired image. One pass of the print head over the paper, compared to several passes from other technologies means that this type of printer is among the fastest on the market. On top of that prints produced by zink printers are pretty durable. The images printer on the special paper are highly resistant to both light and heat.


Even though this technology was introduced, as mentioned before, in 2007 there are quite few printers being sold that make use of it. At the beginning printing with zero ink was limited to a 2 by 3 inch paper format. The printers were small and highly portable but the photographs produced were too small for the needs of some people. The second generation of zink printers however stepped it up a notch and now offer 4 by 6 inch prints. One of these printers is the Pandigital Portable Photo Printer (retailing for about $130).

At a size of 1.5 by 6.2 by 6.7 inches and weighing 1.75 the Pandigital color photo printers are highly portable, this being their main advantage. Speed is more than satisfying too. It takes about 1minute and a small bit for a 4 by 6 sheet of paper to be printer which is about as fast as what both inkjet and dye-sublimation printers supporting the same size of media.

Where this printer falls short is photographic quality. Colors aren't very realistic and a lower level of detail happen pretty often. While the quality is acceptable for a regular user, a more pretentious user will feel the difference between this printer and a higher quality inkjet for sure.


Finally, no ink should mean lower maintenance cost, since you're only paying for the paper, right? Wrong. With paper costing about $40 for 100 sheets, the average cost for printing manages to be higher than in the case of competitors that use inkjet or dye-sublimation technologies. In fact, you might be better off with a Canon Selphy CP780 that's cheaper to buy, run and offers better photo quality.

The Pandigital Portable Photo printer is great to take along on trips and proof that the zink technology still needs a lot of work before blending properly on the photo printer market. When they do manage to perfect it however, it will probably prove to be a great way to print photographs.

Most people now own a digital camera and love to take photos pretty often. This is why buying a photo printer makes a lot of sense. Aside from seeing the photos you shot on your computer's screen you may also print them out and enjoy framing them or putting them in albums. Some dedicated photo printers can be pretty expensive but they offer amazing photo quality.

If it's budget photo printers you're looking for, however, that's not hard to find either. On top of low prices most budget photo printers also offer another advantage, that of portability, since most of the devices included in this category are compact portable printers. As a general idea, there are lots of offerings on the market that can be found even for under $100. The photo quality of most of them isn't exactly of the professional kind but doesn't disappoint either.

One of the top manufacturers of such printers is Canon. Their Selphy line cleverly combines affordability with friendly family-oriented designs, good quality and good portability. The Selphy CP780 offers vivid and impressive photographs. For a bit under $100 it's the ideal printer for family use. The only bad point to it is that you'll have to acquire both the Bluetooth adapter and battery separately which obviously means a lot more money to spend for getting this printer to actually be portable.

The Selphy CP790, a slightly more expensive brother of the CP780 comes with a friendly bucket-like design that's also pretty functional because you can house the photo paper and anything else you might need right under the printer, grab the bucket by the handle and go have a picnic with printing involved. Bluetooth and the battery are also optional so it looks like if you're going to buy Canon you'll have to expect to spend some extra money on top of what you already payed for the actual printer.


Even if it's maybe a bit less popular than Canon for users, Epson manufactures portable printers that were best rated by all reviewing websites and magazines. Out of their lineup we can mention the PictureMate Charm, Dash and Zoom, which, aside from the funny names all offer great features and photo quality. With the PictureMate Charm you'll also get some basic photo editing tools. Battery and Bluetooth remain optional even for Epson.


Finally, a new technology called zink allowed the creation of several extremely small and compact photo printers. Zink stands for zero ink and means that instead of using ink for printing (like most printers do) these odd little printers use a special type of paper and heat to produce photography.

Since the technology is still new, there are only a few printers using zink printing at the moment out of which you can currently get Dell's Wasabi, the Polaroid Pogo or Tomy Xiao TIP-521. What all these printers have in common is an extremely small and portable form factor. The only bad part is that these printers are small enough to limit you to 2 by 3 inch photo paper, which might be a bit too little for most users. Still, Zink printers are very fun to try and retail for affordable prices.

If you're looking to equip a small office with a printer, there's only one type of device that you should be looking after, a multifunction printer. This type of device includes more functions in one and can generally offer copying, scanning, printing and faxing all-in-one.

The reasons why you'd want to go ahead and get a multifunction are numerous. You save money buying only one device instead of four.

You also save money replacing consumables for only one device as well as space in the office and time (no more going back and forth between the fax machine In one office and the printer in the other). To choose out of a huge selection of multifunction printers currently available on the market its important to establish what you need. This 'what you need' business is being mentioned all over the Internet and in magazines but it's very true. Buying a printer for business requires a bit of thought.

First of all you'll need to understand what features you need. Everyone needs printing and copying, but does your office really need faxing or scanning? Also important is what volume of printing you need a month, how many users will be using the printer and whether you can stick to a monochrome or you need color as well. Secondly you need to evaluate the potential cost of ownership. Doesn't matter that you saved a couple of hundred $ when choosing a cheaper yet still high quality printer if you end up paying three times as much on consumables as you would have on slightly more expensive competitors.

This is where laser printers prove to be a much better choice than inkjets generally. Lasers also do better at printing faster than inkjets so also consider that. Some cheaper multifunction printers can be amazingly slow at printing. If you work in a fast paced environment and you find yourself often fighting against time, do your best to avoid sluggish printers even if it might mean spending more money.


Since several people who might not be trained will be using the printer its also important that the printer is easy to use. The user interface has to be intuitive. Finally the print quality doesn't necessarily have to be top of the line. If you mostly need documents and graphics that show and don't care exactly how crisp the text is, this would be a very good area to save money, since printers with not so amazing quality, while fast and capable, are a bit cheaper.


Finally buying a printer for business also means that you might want some office specific features such as an automatic document feeder and duplexer. Having to manually feed every single sheet out of a 30 page set will definitely ruin the day of whoever is responsible for the task. An ADF will get the job done with no hassle at all.

Size matters when it comes to everything that surrounds us. While some objects we may prefer to be as big as possible, others we like to be the smallest possible. When it come to technology the latest trends suggest that a smaller more portable form factor is preferred for laptops, digital cameras and printers alike.

We might have been used to know a laptop as bulky and hard to carry around and see a printer only sitting on our desk due to it's larger size, but all this is about to change with the introduction of portable photo printers.


When the Sony DPP-MP1 was released it was the smallest dye sublimation printer available on the market. The printer weighed under one pound if you didn't count the paper tray or battery and could be moved around with ease. Because of an attractive design it also proved to be a perfect companion for any digital camera. In the box of the printer, upon shipping you'll find paper tray, AC adapter, USB cable and a test printing pack.

The battery pack is bought separately, as in the case of most compact printers and attaches to the end of the printer. With the help of that battery pack you can take your printer along pretty much anywhere without worrying about electricity sources.


Aside from working like any regular printer, connected to a PC through its USB slot, the DPP-MP1 can also work with memory cards and compatible digital cameras. If you're using a Mamory Stick the easiest way to print out your photos is to press the DPOF button that allows you to print all the pictures you've preselected on the digital camera. You also have the option of selecting every picture manually.

Like most other dye-sublimation printers you can find on the market the Sony DPP-MP1 portable photo printers include a ribbon cartridge that contains the three colors you've grown accustomed to, cyan, magenta and yellow. Through heat the ink is vaporized and transferred onto paper.

After the third and last layer of ink is applied the printer also places a protective transparent layer on top. This is meant to make the photographs more resistant throughout time, to scratches and water. Printing media supported consists of 4.12 by 1.97 inch paper that can be found for sale in packs of 24.While some users may prefer a larger format for printing, the small size of this photo printer obviously limits the media size supported.


So what's so great about these little printers? They print great quality photos at relatively fast speeds and can be taken along virtually anywhere with ease. The only thing that you really need to consider is buying the optional battery pack since without it the Sony DPP-MP1 will loose much of its portability. This is, of course, if you're not only visiting places where you know for sure you can plug the printer in.