In any workplace, printing documents quickly and easily is a huge necessity. If you work in an office that’s fast-paced and competitive, it’s even more important that you choose a printer for your business that’s going to help you and your employees speed things along, not slow everything down. But when it comes to finding the best, most reliable printers in Richmond VA, what criteria should you be looking for? What’s important to consider? How do you know which printers are in it for the long haul, and which models are bound to be replaced by next year? It’s not as easy as you might imagine to find a printer that has everything you want. The first step, however, is to know exactly what you’re looking for. If you’re in the market for a reliable, high-quality printer that’s going to make your work life easier, here are some factors to consider.
Laser, Inkjet, or All-in-One?
Before you buy a printer, you’ll have to decide between three different types of industrial machines. There are laser printers, which tend to be higher priced and are extremely fast even when it comes to glossy jobs. Since laser printers use toner, which is dry, rather than wet ink, you don’t have to worry about smudging or blurring even when your printer is busting out tons of copies at the speed of light. An inkjet printer might be the budget option in terms of price, but the range of quality between different inkjet machines can be pretty extreme. The right inkjet printer can produce beautiful jobs for half the price of a traditional laser printer, though color ink printing and large printing jobs can be a struggle since ink cartridges tend to be expensive. All-in-one printers, on the other hand, are exactly what they sound like. If you’ve ever worked in a traditional office, you’ve seen an all-in-one printer. It’s a giant machine that can do just about everything, from printing to copying to scanning. The downside is that these machines cost quite a lot, and if you’re not printing tons of copies each day, the overall expensive might not be worth it.
Speed
If getting things printed quickly is your priority, a laser printer or an all-in-one is your best bet. While laser printers are famously the gold standard when it comes to pages printed per minute, the many loading trays and high speed offered by all-in-one machines create the ability for businesses to print out hundreds of double-sided or single-sided sheets in practically no time at all. The difference between the two is the cost and the need. If you work in a building that has less than 20 employees, you might not actually need an all-in-one, as enticing as the sound of one might be. However, if you’re working in a high-powered environment with tons of meetings, employees, and status updates taking place all day, you don’t want to have to rely on one printer for everything.
Connectivity
You can have the greatest printer in the world, but what good is it if you can’t figure out how to work it? For many older workers, it’s a struggle to figure out how to hook up a brand new machine to a specific computer without taking a ton of time out of the day. When you run a small business of even a few employees, the more practical thing to do, rather than having a central “printing” computer, is to find a way for everybody to connect to the machine and order jobs on demand. While this is an option offered by most all-in-one printers and many laser models, some inkjet printers make this more difficult by requiring to be directly hooked up to a computer in order to process a printing job.
Cost
In any business, cost is a major factor when it comes to purchasing a machine that everyone has to use on a daily basis. However, finding the right printer comes down to a lot more than cost. First, you should take into account the size of your business, and the median age of your employees. How important is printing to your business, and how often do you share things online rather than printing them out? Can you cut back on printing costs by opting for a less expensive machine like an inkjet, or go all out on a laser printer that can only be used for the design department or your business? It’s up to you. However, when considering cost, be realistic about how much use you’re actually planning to get out of your purchase.
