A home office can mean different setups for different professionals, but they are usually not meant for multiple workers, unlike the usual office space. In most instances, you are probably the only person working in your home office, but a personal assistant/secretary may also be present. The key fact is that a home office is not meant for a large workforce, which is why the average office printer might not be the choice for your own home office either.
How Should You Choose a Printer for Your Home Office?
There are three parameters to choosing printers for any home office. These are use, budget, and technology, in that order. This means you should first determine why you need a printer, set a budget, and then choose the printing tech that best suits that need and budget. If you wish to skip the steps, check the recommended Lenovo home office printer in every price bracket right now. These are preselected based on the criteria that we are about to discuss. If you want to go through with the steps first, let’s get started with the reason(s) why you need a printer.
Use
Different printers are meant to serve different functions, but we will get to the features later. Let us first determine why you need the printer in the first place. Just jot down the answers to the following questions and we will proceed to the next step.
- How frequently are you expecting to use the printer?
- Do you need colour printouts often?
- Do you usually print out text documents (including graphs, stats, etc.) for the most part?
- Do you need to print out colour photos in high quality as part of the job?
Budget
Now that we have narrowed down the requirements, setting a budget should be much easier. Market prices fluctuate all the time, but the standards for each printer type will remain more or less the same. You will need to spend the most for a colour laser printer, and the least for an inkjet printer. Ink tank printers can be costly, but the extra cost is mostly because the ink in them does not dry up so easily, which is a big problem with inkjet cartridges.
Technology
Spending money on a colour laser printer that will be restricted to home office use only would be a waste of money in most cases. They can print super sharp text and graphs at high speed, but it is difficult to find use for that outside of a busy office with several employees. Also, they are not good at printing photos at all, even at that high price.
Inkjet printers are the cheapest options, but their cartridges dry up fast, especially when not in use. However, they are also best suited for home office use. Quality inkjet printers can print out photos and text with equal clarity.
Entry level ink tank printers are comparatively expensive, but the airtight ink tanks do not allow the inks to dry up as easily. They do require manual ink refiling, which can be a bit difficult at first. Nonetheless, if you have the budget, they might turn out to be better investment in the long run. Now that you know how to choose, just make sure that your final choice also comes with copying and scanning features built in.
