Here, we’ll explore the different types of inkjets, and highlight some key features to look for when shopping for one.
Know Your Inkjets
With so many to choose from, it’s helpful to determine just what you want to do with the printer before you start shopping.
Some inkjets are meant for home use, a few are aimed at offices, and others are good for dual use in a home and home office. Several models are made to output nothing but photos, and are ideal for printing out snapshots on the spot, while others print text and graphics as well, and also excel at printing out gallery-worthy prints.
The so-called near-dedicated photo printers are widely used by professional photographers, artists looking to output high-end work, and amateur photo enthusiasts alike. There are even inkjets designed for mobile printing, complete with batteries. Most home inkjets are meant for personal printing or, at most, shared models for outputting a few pages per day. They tend to be compact, and the vast majority of them are small enough to share a desk with.
Graphics and Text Quality
You can count on almost any inkjet to print graphics well enough for both internal business use (like printing PowerPoint handouts) and home tasks (like producing party invitations). If you choose carefully, you can have output quality a graphic artist would be happy with.
The Achilles’ heel for inkjets is text quality. Ink tends to bleed into plain paper, which makes it hard to print text with the fully professional look you’d want for documents like a résumé or a business proposal. Not surprisingly, inkjets meant for the office generally do better on this score than home-oriented models, but we have yet to see an inkjet that prints text with the crisp, clean edges and smear-proof ink you’d get from any laser printer. Worse, most inks will smear if you spill something on them or try using a highlighter.
That said, most inkjets at least can print text at a quality that’s perfectly fine for most everyday output. And although it may not be easy to find an inkjet with stellar text quality, there are a few of them out there.
Photo Printing
Nearly any current inkjet can print photos that at least match the quality you’d expect from your local drugstore. The few exceptions are primarily among printers aimed at offices, but even most office inkjets do a decent job. You can even find a few all-purpose inkjets whose output rivals photo printers meant for professional photographers.
Inkjets for the Office
Office-oriented inkjets include the few single-function printers and MFPs designed for relatively heavy-duty printing, as well as those that have office-centric features. For instance, they can work as standalone fax machines; fax directly from your PC’s hard drive; and scan to email easily, using your PC’s email program and automatically adding the scan as an attachment.
Office MFPs add an automatic document feeder (ADF) for easy scanning, faxing, and copying of multipage documents. Some ADFs can scan both sides of a page. Of those, duplexing scanners, which scan both sides of a page at once, are much faster than models with duplexing or reversing ADFs (two names for the same thing), which scan one side, flip the page over, and scan the other.
Office MFPs generally offer paper capacities of 200 sheets or more. Should you want to print two-sided documents, you’ll want a model with an auto-duplexer. Get a model with two paper trays if you want the ability to print with two types or size of paper without having to remove and replace the paper each time you make a switch. A few office inkjets support printing at up to tabloid size, letting you get all those spreadsheet columns onto a single page.
