Most customers who are shopping for a printer have a hard time deciding whether to go for an inkjet or a laser. Most salesmen aren't much help either since almost every time they will suggest the most expensive product. When choosing an office printer there are many details you need to study. First off all you must establish what features you need. For example you might not need faxing features but a duplexer may come in handy.

There are good points and bad points to both laser vs inkjet printers but there are also some 'rules' that aren't as true as you may think. For one, they say laser printers are as a rule faster than inkjets. This is rarely true nowadays. When you'll have to print complex color documents and require larger paper coverage then yes, lasers are generally faster. For laser printers there isn't much difference between printing draft or high quality, printing a whole page or just text.

For inkjets however, the more coverage you have and the better the quality, the higher the printing time. If you're just interested in mono and color documents with low paper coverage both technologies will do about as well. Thus, lasers have constant performance. Inkjets are slower on photos and graphics but generally faster at draft quality text. Laser printers also have warm up times and when you're printing rarely you'll have to include that time in the printing time as well. It can sometimes be annoying to wait 20-30 seconds for a page to start printing.

Printing costs tend to be higher for inkjets. This is strictly because ink cartridges can become clogged when you're using the printer less often. To clean the cartridge more ink is used. Apart from printing cost is about the same. It used to be higher in the case of inkjets a few years ago, before inkjets started using separate tanks of ink, but now it's not the case anymore. Toners for lasers have a higher capacity but also a higher cost and overall you will reach the same maintenance price.

A big difference regards the size of the devices. Laser color printers are almost always very bulky. Inkjets are much smaller and most of them won't take up your whole desk whereas lasers might even need to be seated on the floor. Then again, laser printers offer more paper storage capacity. So if you're printing needs are massive, it's better to chose a large printer and not be bothered with changing replacing paper every one or two hours.

Even now lasers excel text printing. They produce sharp, crisp high quality prints. The table is turned when it comes to photo printing where lasers don't do so well, but inkjets shine. You can even get special photo cartridges for inkjet printers that will further improve quality. Unfortunately no one printer can offer everything and both inkjet and laser printers have qualities and flaws. Before choosing a laser vs inkjet printer you must seriously consider what your office really needs out of such a device.