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.
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.
More: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7xiub/buying_a_g...