Businesses Need a Printer With Staying Power

Color inkjet printers keep getting cheaper, but the low-cost models designed for light-duty consumer use are usually ill-suited for small businesses. Even home-based business owners should think about what they need before picking up a machine at a bargain price.

It’s not that low-cost machines don’t print good-looking documents. Most do a wonderful job, but they usually print slowly, don’t hold many sheets of paper and aren’t designed for heavy use. Fortunately, the same companies that make consumer printers also offer beefed-up versions for businesses. The prices start around $250.

One thing you get when you spend a bit more for a printer is a more rugged machine designed for heavy use. Most manufacturers rate their printers by how many sheets of paper they can print per month. The higher the number, the more rugged the machine. Hewlett-Packard’s 890 color inkjet printer, an entry-level machine for small businesses, is rated for 3,000 pages a month, while the heavier HP 2500 machine is designed to handle up to 12,000 sheets a month. The company’s consumer printers are typically rated to handle between 200 and 1,000 sheets a month.

Epson estimates the total life of the printer. Its low-end consumer machines are rated for about 10,000 pages while its business models are designed to go for about 75,000 copies. These are just estimates, but they’re a rough indication of the machine’s likely duty cycle.

Speed is an important factor, especially if lots of people are going to be using the printer. No one likes to wait long for their own print job, and it can be especially annoying if you’re waiting for someone else to finish before you can even start. HP’s 2000 printer, which costs $595, has about the same print quality as the less expensive HP 895 series of printers, but instead of chugging along at about five pages a minute (in black), it spits out nearly 10 pages a minute. Most printers are rated using their fastest possible speed, but slowing them down increases quality. Nevertheless, with the HP 2000, even the fast “draft” mode is good enough for most of my work. Color printing is always slower than printing in black and photos take even longer, depending on the image itself.

If your office has a local area network, or LAN, consider getting a printer designed to plug directly into the network hub. Just about all printers can be accessed via a network if they are attached to a computer that’s on the LAN, but for the best performance and least hassle you want a printer that plugs directly into the network. That eliminates people having to route their print jobs through the computer that’s connected to the printer, which can slow down print jobs and interfere with the machine it’s connected to.

Another important factor in office printing is the ability to manage ink and supplies. Manufacturers make a great deal of money on ink, and most businesses will spend a lot more on supplies than they will for the equipment. So before you invest in a printer, find out what it costs to operate. Ask if there is an estimated price per page or just see how much ink costs and how many copies you get per ink cartridge. The HP 2000 series and the new Canon 6000 printers, for example, have individual color cartridges, so if you run out of cyan, for example, you just replace the cyan ink tank without having to buy a whole new color cartridge with cyan, magenta and yellow ink. Some printers have a more expensive single cartridge for all colors that you have to replace even if you just run out of one color.

Paper capacity can be very important. You don’t want to have to run to the printer every half an hour to replenish the paper. Some inkjet printers hold as few as 100 sheets, but the ones that are all business--like the HP 2500C, store up to 400 sheets divided between two media trays so you can have two different types of paper (or envelopes) in the printer at the same time.

Canon last week introduced its new $249 BJC 6000 machine that prints at up to eight pages a minute in black and five pages per minute in color. It holds 130 sheets of paper and, in addition to the standard parallel port connection, you can purchase an optional kit to connect it to a Windows or Mac USB port or a network hub.

Obviously, print quality is an important factor. I haven’t tried the new Canon machine, but I did test both the HP 2000 and the $449 Epson 9000. I give the HP a slight edge for text but prefer the Epson when it comes to color photos. The HP is more expensive than the Epson, but it’s a very rugged machine that can serve as a reliable office workhorse.

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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached via e-mail at magid@latimes.com, or visit his Web site at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”