The really big thing to look at is ink prices and ink capacity. Some printers have cheap ink made by third parties that lasts forever. Some printers have expensive ink only made by the company that only lasts 100 pages.
That's really the only thing that I research when buying a printer.
Another important thing to look at is where the ink jet nozzle is placed. Some printers have this as a more durable part that's separate from the cartridge, whereas others have it in a more disposable form on the cartridge itself.
One lasts much longer, and the other will crap out shortly if you try refilling it too many times. It's a great way for them to keep you going back for the "real" ink.
"Buying a printer remains the last confusing part of modern computing."
Graphics cards are just as bad. RAM can be tricky with all the different types and price points. And how are you supposed to compare between the different CPUs with different numbers of cores, processor speeds, L2 Caches, bus speeds . . .
Everything about buying a computer is complicated for the uninitiated. Even hard drives, which should be a matter of picking the biggest one, have different speeds to complicate matters.
Of course, once you've bought a few printers it will all make perfect sense and you'll forget that it seemed confusing.
normal computer users don't buy graphics cards or care about cpu l2 caches. they buy things like laptops and imacs that just work and they never upgrade them or take them apart.
unless you're an avid gamer, graphics designer, or building your own pc, i don't know why anyone would even care what kind of graphics card their computer has.
The solution to the colour printer problem is not to buy a printer. I've probably spent as much time trying to get home colour printing to work well as I have re-installing windows. These days neither thing (colour printer or windows pc) exists in my life. Use a cheap laser for black & white and when you need a colour print send it to the copy shop/bureau.
That's a good idea, but when I bought a laser printer (a Brother) last year, I was disappointed with its quality. (Seemed dim and/or pixelated.) Any recommendations for a reasonable laser?
If all you want is a printer, the old HPs are really good. The Laserjet 4 in particular was a high water mark in quality. You can find them fairly cheaply, and if you fix the one problem they have (accordion jams), which is not very difficult and requires about $20 worth of parts, they will basically last forever, and are cheap to run.
The output quality from these printers is about the best I've seen from a laser.
Printing needs the equivalent of the ipod or flip video camera: something that was redesigned to do the most common stuff really well and is dead simple easy to use
Most printers are simple to use and do the common stuff (printing black text on white paper for non-critical documents) really, really well.
That being said, if you want the iPod experience on a printer, come to a Japanese showroom some time and look for the ones aimed at women. ("You can sell electronics to women?!" -- US tech industry)
Sleek industrial design, appealing bright colors, focused mainly on easy integration with cameras (another consumer electronics item Japan does really well) with every single sample print being "three of the girls having a fun day out" or "the loving family, perfection captured on film".
Printers are not about putting ink on paper. That's just what they do.
They were 5 years ago, but they're hard again for some reason. Not too long ago you could plug a printer into your router, find it on the network from any machine and print to it. No software install. Just find it and print. If you weren't on a network, you could just plug the USB jack into your machine and print just as easily. Remember plug and play?
For some reason, it doesn't work like that anymore. You need to find the CD and install the drivers, and even then chances are you won't be able to connect to it over the network. Even if you have the USB cable plugged into your box, it's not smart enough to pretend it's a memory stick and give you the drivers you need.
In my experience any moving part in a computer (fans, magnetic platter hard disks) will eventually fail, and printers are certainly no exception to this. Like the Office Space fax machine, all printers I've ever had to interact with have got paper jams or problems with paper feeding. I believe the printer at work actually came with a contract with a repairman that would come and do magic with it when it failed, which was often.
An ideal printer would have the minimal amount of moving parts. Currently printing consists of taking a slip of paper and moving it vertically while moving the printing head from left to right. Some companies are researching alternative printers, here's one which has eliminated having to move the printing head: http://silverbrookresearch.com/l-en/technology.html
Now if some company could manage printing entire pages at a time and somehow eliminate having to move the paper very much, things might actually work quickly and without jams.
This problem isnt limited only to printers. In my opinion it is also present when buying internal PC components.
For example how do you choose which graphics card to buy? The model number / name of the product isnt gonna help you at all. So you would think that the specifications would help you compare products. They do, but only to some extent. For example is a 4 core processor at 2Ghz better than a 2 core at 4Ghz? And then sometimes the specs even "lie". For example graphics card RAM is cheap so companies like adding a lot of it to their products. It has come to the point where a 8600 nVidia card I saw had 1 gig of RAM, where Im pretty sure that it can only use half of that.
So all we are left with are benchmarks... which also have their downsides.
High graphics card memory has its benefits - it allows the use of high-resolution textures (which has the maximum benefit at high display resolutions). It also allows developers to do more work without hitting your bus, which is the real benefit.
Nowadays all games use shaders, which are GPU programs that can transform images (and geometry, but that's another story). One of the chief pains in graphics programming is the necessity to feed data to the card, run a shader on it, and feed the data back into RAM for lack of graphics memory, so you can make room for something else.
Bus speed is the killer of 3D performance. Pushing and pulling data cross PCI-express 16x is really, really slow compared to how fast your shaders run. More memory really does give you significantly higher performance.
i found it ironic that jason ended the article asking for suggestions, and there are now as many suggestions for different models as there were on the page he took a screenshot of.
"they all come from reputable brands. We have options from Canon, HP, Brother, and Samsung."
I think HP printers are junk, at least in the below $500 range.
I recommend buying a Xerox laser printer. In my country I've seen a Xerox all-in-one color laser printer for about $500. It's more expensive than ink printers but you save a lot of money since toners are cheaper than ink.
Aside: How can HP be called reputable? I think they're just living off on what's left of their reputation. Every HP device I've seen was shitty and full of bloatware.
That's really the only thing that I research when buying a printer.