Printers for home

There are two main types of printers for home users, ink jet printers and laser printers.

Ink jet printers print in colour or black and white and provide additional scanner and copier features too. However genuine ink cartridges can be expensive

- often more than the printer itself. The cartridges can also dry out if not used regularly, or  the print nozzles can block up with dried ink..

Low priced laser printers, (usually black and white only), use a powder, rather than a liquid ink, so cartridges don’t dry up and last a lot longer too. They are also quicker at printing and the cost per page a lot cheaper.

If you only print out in monochrome and you do a lot of printing, laser printers are a good choice and cheaper overall.

However, if you like to print out in colour and also need scan and copier functions, then an All-In-One ink jet is the better choice.

Tips, on what to look for when buying a printer. Try not to buy the cheapest one you can get. Go for one with a largish display panel, this makes it easy to setup and troubleshoot rather than just a series of unhelpful led lights.

Look for a printer that does double side printing too which can save a lot of paper.

Finally some printer manufacturers for example Hewlett Packard (HP) offer excellent “instant ink plans” now where you can pay less than £2 per month for upto 50 pages a month and get the cartridges sent to you automatically in the post direct from HP, see below link for further details

https://instantink.hpconnected.com/uk/en/l/