Looking for a Printer for Sale?
If you’re in the market for a new printer, whether for home or office use, it pays to do a little research on what your exact needs are before searching “printer for sale” online. There are many manufacturers offering a variety of printers for sale. There are also different technologies available that suit different environments and print output types. A decision also needs to be made whether a print-only machine or a multifunctional device would work best for you.
Which Technology?
Most people looking for a printer for sale in the marketplace will be faced with choosing a device that employs either inkjet or laser technology. This choice applies to both office and home users. Inkjet and laser printing technologies are fundamentally different. Inkjets produce prints by spraying microscopic droplets of liquid ink onto paper in a precisely controlled manner where lasers use heat and pressure to melt a dry toner made up of pigment and ultra-fine plastic particles onto the surface of the paper.
When looking at printers for sale, inkjet machines are typically cheaper than their equivalent laser-based counterparts. Inkjet technology is particularly good at producing high-quality graphic output because they do a better job of blending colours than laser machines do. They can, however, also be used to print text documents. Inkjet technology tends to produce prints at higher costs per print than lasers do. They can also usually not achieve the print speeds of lasers.
Laser devices are better for text documents and should top your list of printers for sale if this type of output is going to be the bulk of your work. Laser printers have historically had the lowest cost per page but more and more inkjet machines are being sold with refillable ink tanks and are starting to offer comparatively affordable costs per page. Where high volumes of basic text documents are needed, a laser, black and white, or colour option will deliver superior speed and lower cost per print than an inkjet alternative.
Printer for Sale – What to Look for
One of the most important questions to ask is how many prints you are likely to get from each ink or toner cartridge in the unit you are considering. This varies from model to model and will also be different depending on the technology chosen. Manufacturers will provide an indication of expected yield per cartridge for each machine they sell. It is usually stated as a certain number of prints of a specified page size (usually A4 or Letter size), with a coverage per page of a certain percentage. For example, 5000 A4 prints with 5% coverage. Knowing the yield and the replacement cartridge cost will allow you to calculate your print costs.
Look at the duty cycle that the manufacturer specifies the machine is designed for and buy a machine that is suited to the volume you expect to print. A machine designed to print a maximum of 1000 pages a month is not going to handle 10 000 prints a month without breaking down or requiring excessive maintenance.
Knowing whether the print output is for resale to end users or targeted at external customers or is purely for internal company meeting minutes and e-mails determines which print technology should be used. Inkjet is best for high-quality graphics or presentations and laser for the more mundane high-volume output.
If your company is serious about reducing their carbon footprint, a machine capable of printing on both sides of the paper (duplexing) saves on paper usage and is therefore more eco-friendly than a simplex-only unit.
Higher-End Features
Larger, more sophisticated printers for sale offer a number of additional features and benefits that smaller, lower-cost units do not. If, for instance, you work in an environment where a large number of employees access the printers, a machine that has individualised user logins will help control print costs and improve document security.
Would your environment be better served by a multifunctional device that is not only capable of printing? Multifunctional devices combine printing with a number of other functionalities, such as scanning, faxing, copying, and e-mailing. The latest models include features such as AirPrint, allowing for prints to be made directly from an Apple device or ePrint that allows documents to be e-mailed to the printer for printing whether in house or remotely.
Printer for Sale – Who to Buy From
If you want to have all the above questions answered expertly, instead of looking up “printer for sale”, go to Raydian directly. At Raydian, we stock all the leading brands and will give you informed, honest advice on what’s best for you when it comes to a printer or multifunctional device.
Contact us for more information.