Printer Buying Guide: How to choose a printer that best fits your needs - Speed, resolution, and color claims

Speed, resolution, and color claims

It used to be fairly easy for a printer manufacturer to make outrageous claims about how fast their printers were or what you could expect as far as page yield from an ink or toner cartridge. Today, nearly all vendors use a standardized set of tests developed and licensed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The ISO test protocols provide a level playing field — all the claims and ratings are developed using the same document sets and the test procedures. Important specs include:

PPM: This means “pages per minute” and is a guide to how fast a printer can print pages. That seems simple enough, but PPM can quickly grow complex. For example, printers have very different PPMs for black and white versus color, so it’s common for many printers to provide two different PPMs if they are color-focused. PPM isn’t especially important for home printers unless you find yourself under time pressure for a print job or need to print a lot at once. Average black-and-white PPM is around 15 to 20 pages. Color tends to be less, at around 10 to 15 pages per minute.

DPI: This refers to “dots per inch” or how many dots of ink the printer can apply to a square inch of paper. This spec is useful in studying just how good a printer is at creating high-resolution, high-detail images. It’s also a little outdated, however: Newer printing methods and software can enhance the resolution of a printed image without changing the DPI, so don’t let it be the ultimate deciding spec.

Duty cycle: This number is how many pages per month a printer can reasonably be expected to print. You want your expected number of pages per month to be well below this number so your printer doesn’t experience as much wear and tear. It’s an important number for a busy office with lots of printing needs, but it’s less important for the typically less-intense home use.

Use these specs as a basis for comparing one device with another, but remember that they aren’t all-encompassing factors, especially if you’re looking for something specific.