Today's printers are useful for a wide variety of tasks, including printing web pages, brochures to advertise your home business, creating custom greeting cards for friends and family, and sharing your digital camera photographs with others.

Most of the printers you will find are color inkjet printers and black-and-white laser printers. Both will create sharp printouts. Printer quality is measured in dots per inch (dpi), and even the least expensive inkjet printers will print at a sharp 1200dpi. The brands of printers that Abt carries are Canon and Sony. Many of today's printers have the capabilities of being multi-functional. They can print, copy, scan, and fax, all for as little as $99 or less.

The big differentiating factors among printers are speed, price, and color. Laser printers, which can cost from as little as $200 to more than $1,000, are fast and best for printing text, but they provide only monochrome output unless you are willing to spend significantly more for the color units. Basic inkjet printers can cost as little as $50, but more expensive models can be as fast as many laser printers. Color inkjets are also much better suited for printing photographs.

Some inkjet printers offer special ink cartridges with extra colors for more accurate photo printing (Canon offers up to 9 in some models). These printers have the advantage of allowing you to change only the color you run out of. This is better suited for photo and high volume printing. For low volume printing, it is better to use dual ink cartridge printers (black and tri-color ink cartridges).

Specialized photo printers frequently offer slots that let you directly print from the removable memory used in digital cameras. Photo printers are available in inkjet and dye-sublimation models. Inkjet photo printers produce stunning output and can create prints at 8x10 inches or larger. Dye-sublimation printing uses special ribbons and media, and produces prints that look almost like a continuous tone photograph on photographic paper. With photo printers, the main consideration is the size of the prints that you will be producing. Dye-sublimation printers give excellent results, but cost per print is substantially greater than that of an inkjet.

While laser and inkjet printers will meet most of your needs, specialty printers might be better suited to some applications. Label printers offer convenient, speedy printing of mailing labels, product labels, and even electronic postage stamps. You can even buy a special printer that can make your CD-Rs look professionally printed.

When buying a printer, keep in mind the three main factors: speed, color, and price. Today's inkjets offer a good combination of all three. Laser printers have come down in price and offer long-term savings if you print a large volume of copies (a laser printer's cost per page is the lowest of all the printer types). However, if you need color output, the least expensive color laser printers (non-multifunctional) still cost more than $400.

Borderless Photo Printing
This feature lets you print to the edge of the page without any border.

Duplex printing
Also known as two-sided printing, it is a function that prints on both sides of the paper.

Dye-sublimation printing
A dye-sublimation printer uses a special ribbon, paper, and print head. Sublimation is the process of turning a solid directly into a gas without passing through a liquid phase. Because dye-sub printers deposit the color as a gas rather than as a liquid, the result is very much like the continuous tone of a photograph.

Inkjet printer
The most popular type of printer, an inkjet uses small drops of liquid ink in various colors to produce an image on the page. These drops are literally shot onto the paper.

Laser printer
A printer that uses the xerographic process to produce a print. A special drum is sensitized by a laser, picks up powdered toner, and deposits it onto a piece of paper. The toner is then heated and fused onto the paper to produce the printed page. Some "laser" printers actually use LEDs (light emitting diodes) to "write" on the drum.

PPM
Be skeptical about vendors' page-per-minute (PPM) ratings. These ratings are often calculated on actual printing time when using draft, or low, quality settings and for printing only on a small portion of the page. Actual speed when printing a large photo or complex graphics can be much slower.

Photo ink cartridge
Most inkjet printers use a four-color printing system with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks. Individual ink printers often have additional photo inks that add additional shades of cyan and magenta to provide a greater tonal range on prints and produce more photo-like output. Some higher end photo printers have as many as 9 ink cartridges.

Removable media
Most digital cameras use special memory cards to store images. The most popular of these are CompactFlash, SmartMedia, and Memory Stick cards. Some new photo printers have built-in readers that let you print images directly from these removable media cards without using a computer.

Wireless Printing
Allows the user to print wirelessly using a home wireless network.

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