Computer-Teacher

Author: James Kara Murat

Nearly all the printer manufacturers design special machines for small office use. These machines differ slightly from personal or home printers and large office printers in all of their features and specifications. There are multiple specifications that are characteristic of a printer meant for small office use. In order to select an appropriate color laser printer for your small office, you must always keep ten points in mind.

Firstly, a small office printer should have a reasonable printing speed. The typical printing speed for office printers is 22 ppm. In general, it can vary from 20 ppm to 35 ppm. Machines with lesser speeds are meant for personal use and not for offices. Secondly, it should possess a sufficiently large media capacity. It is better to have more than one trays to ensure a media capacity of at least 150 sheets. The paper capacity up to 600 sheets is appropriate.

Thirdly, while choosing a laser printer for a small office, you must make sure that the machine can be shared by a group of users and is not meant for individual use. This is specified by its type in the product description. Only if the printer type is specified as ‘workgroup’, can it be used in small offices. Fourthly, you should make sure that the machine you select has a sufficiently high duty cycle ranging from 20,000 to 25,000 pages.

The fifth thing that the machine should have sufficiently large cartridges to prevent interruptions during the tasks. This tenth point is of immense importance in rendering a machine suitable for office use.

The sixth important feature that your small office printer must possess is small size and less weight. The machine must be compact and should weigh no more than 5 kg. However if it is a multifunction machine, it may weigh as much as 16.5 kg.

The seventh quality you should look for in a machine for your small office is the ability to work without creating noise. Quiet operation is necessary for a small office computer. The eighth point you must remember while selecting a color laser printer is that it should have a high resolution. It must have a printing resolution of 1200 dpi into 600 dpi or 1200 dpi into 1200 dpi. The ninth important quality that makes a machine eligible for use in small offices is that it should be able to print on large size media including the legal size.

Last but not the least, your machine should be able to print onto multiple media types. It should be able to print on plain paper, cards, envelopes, labels and transparencies. None of these points should be ignored in order to make an ideal purchase. Office machines are costly and should be chosen with ultimate care.

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Author: James Kara Murat

Understanding printer terminology helps one to search for, select and operate printers in a better and effective way. One of these important printer terms is DPI which stands for Dots per inch. It is a quantity used to define the resolution of printer images. The higher the DPI, the greater will be the details with which the image is displayed. The term used to measure the printing speed is known as PPM. PPM stands for pages per minute and defines the number of pages printed by a machine in one minute.

Another important term used to define the performance of a printer is bit depth. It defines the number of various color tones linked with a dot. A bit depth of 1 implies 2 colors, a depth of 8 implies 256 colors and that of 24 implies 16.7 million colors. Color balance is a term used to describe the print quality. It is a measure of an image color cast. Duty cycle is the number of printed pages a printer can produce as an output.

AIO and MFP stand for All in one and Multifunction Printer respectively. These terms refer to machines that are a combination of printer, copier and scanner. An inkjet printer terminology is CYMK which defines the inkjet colors. In CYMK, C stands for cyan, Y stands for yellow, M stands for magenta and K stands for black. A term used as an alternative for printer brand name is OEM ink cartridges or printers which stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer.

Different terms used to explain types of printing are duplex printing, 4×6 printing, 6 ink printing, 7 ink printing and 8 ink printing. Of these, duplex printing refers to two sided printing whereby the printer itself reverses the page after one of the sides has been printed. 4×6 printing produces photograph of snapshot size, while 6, 7 and 8 ink printing technologies employ multiple inks to produce high quality, clear and bright results.

Anti aliasing is an important technology whereby a printer applies mathematical formulae to improve the resolution of character edges.Letter Quality refers to a printer that is able to produce text similar to that produced by a type writer. Near letter quality refers to dot matrix printers which produce text almost similar to that produced by a letter quality printer.

Paper capacity indicates the maximum number of printer papers or other media a printer tray is able to contain. Print zone refers to the part of the sheet on which the printer is supposed to print.

Borderless printing is a terminology used to define a technique whereby photos are produced by a printer with no blank spaces at the edges of the page. Brightness refers to the lightness or darkness of the printed image. A pixel refers to one of the thousand dots of which a digital photograph is made of.

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