The difference between an inkjet and laser printer

We sometimes get asked what printer customers should buy. We sell papers for laser and inkjet printers. As you can imagine we have tried out many types of printers and here I will give our view of the pros and cons.

Inkjet printers are much slower at printing but are very easy to use and will give great results. You can print many kinds of paper through them and change the settings. If you have a thick paper then you can change the paper to thicker paper setting. There is always a good range of settings and you can choose what paper size you want to print off. There are many models on the market and you can buy a good one for very little money. If you are a home user and do not want to print of loads of documents then I would stick with an inkjet printer.



Laser printers are so different to inkjet printer; they are quite big and heavy and print off documents very quickly. If you want to print off many documents then buy a laser printer. But they are very very expensive to run! The toners cost a fortune even if you get them re-filled. We once bought an Epson laser printer and we took out the insurance when we bought it. It went wrong and thought our insurance covered it but oh no it only covered the casing and the engine. The rest of the machine was a consumable and we weren't covered. I would suggest you buy a laser printer and when you have to start replacing the drums etc which are all consumables, you buy a new one, it will work out cheaper.



Never get the insurance out for a new laser printer, it is a total waste of money. You pay it for three years and I can guarantee you will replace it within three years. The insurance does not cover the consumables and most of the laser printer is a consumable and needs to be replaced after a certain amount of pages printed. They are all different and some laser paper works with some and not for others. Depending which company you buy from they will always say you have to use their paper for the printer to work properly. I sometimes think this is a bit of a sales ploy. You can print off any type of uncoated paper in a laser printer. You could use the same paper in an inkjet printer too. Some papers we sell will not work in an inkjet printer only a laser, the ink will not dry if it is put through an inkjet printer.



Laser printer settings are very limited and hard to adjust. They also have different paper feeds and these can be very complicated. They are not as easy to use as an inkjet printer, great if you have an office and you want a printer/photocopier. They are basically a photocopier attached to a computer; the quality isn't always as good as an inkjet printer. We use laser printers in the office for printing off instructions and orders and we really need them because of the volume but when they go wrong it can take a whole morning to get them going again. We now use a company who turns up and looks after them and re-fills the toners. The toners are so expensive and they never seem to be empty when they say they are empty but you have to replace them or the machine will not print. You don't just have one colour or a black and white cartridge; you have four colours and one colour always seem to run out more then others, very frustrating.

To recap, if you don't need to print off many documents then use an inkjet printer if you have a great deal of documents to print off then get a laser printer.

In the office we use HP inkjet printers and we also have an Epsom to test the papers on too. We have been through quite a few laser printers from Epsom to Cannon. The best laser printer we have used for the longest amount of time is an OKI printer.