The majority of businesses are majorly dependent on technology, and if you’re a small business owner you’ll probably have already bought a number of different gadgets in order to help you manage your business as best you can. Printers are just one piece of technology that are essential for any business – even though you can do a lot of things online or via email, you’ll probably still need to print documents such as invoices and receipts, and documents that you need regarding tax. If you’re planning to purchase a printer for your business, there are a number of things that you’ll need to take into consideration. Here are some of the main ones.

Price

Before you go out there and purchase the cheapest printer that you can find in order to cover all of your basic printing jobs, it’s a good idea to first ask yourself whether the cheapest printer is actually the most affordable one. Although it’s wise not to spend any more money than you can realistically afford, it’s important to consider the cost of running your printer as well as the initial cost of buying it. In general, the cheaper the initial cost of a printer, the more you will end up spending on ink – therefore it may work out more cost effective to invest more money in a printer initially.

Which Ink?

Choosing a printer based on its underlying technology is much less problematic these days than it used to be as the differences in print output quality and printing speed have significantly narrowed. If you plan to use your printer for printing plain text documents such as letters and spreadsheets, you will probably be fine with a monochrome laser or LED printer – and you can pick up consumables such as HP printer parts at relatively cheap prices. However, if you’re planning to print more complicated documents such as photos and need great photo quality, you will be better with an inkjet or solid ink printer.

Size and Speed

Another two big factors that you should take into consideration when choosing a printer for your office is the size of the printer and the speed in which it prints documents. You should choose a printer to accommodate the size of the area where you are going to store it – big printers could quickly fill up a small office, whereas if you have a large office you’ll be able to accommodate a larger printer model. When it comes to the printing speed, you’ll need to take into consideration the amount of printing that you’ll need to do – if you have a lot of documents to get through in a day you’ll probably be looking for a faster printer, whereas if you only plan to use it occasionally, you’ll be able to get away with a slower printing speed.

Do you own a business? How and why did you choose the printer that you use? If you’d like to offer any advice to fellow business owners, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.