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Fitting the Pieces Together: A Guide to Office Operations for the Liquid Waste, Portable Toilet & Septic Pumping Industries |
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Buying a printer can have a major impact on your business. Whatever is in the computer can only get out one of two ways, the screen or the printer. If your printer does not work well, business stops. It is important to choose the right one.
There are several types of printers:
Dot matrix
Line printer
Bubble
Laser
These printers print one character at a time on the paper. The quality of the print depends upon the number of dots, or pins, that the printer shapes the characters with. The more pins, the higher the quality of the printed character. Typically, these printers come in 9- or 24-pin models. They usually have the following features:
Print on single sheet or computer paper
Print between 150 to 450 characters per second in draft mode
Print on NCR or multi-part forms
These are excellent printers for small to medium size business operations. If you convert the characters per second to pages per minute they print from 1 to 2 pages per minute in draft mode. This is fine for simple invoices and reports. If you use any fonts, special graphics or word processing, the printer can slow down to less than a page per minute; very, very slow!
The special feature that this printer has is that it can print on NCR paper, i.e., multiple copies. Leaders for this type of printer are OKIdata and Panasonic. A model that prints about 250 to 300 characters per second in draft mode should cost between $250 and $300.
Line printers print a whole line of text at a time. These printers are usually used in medium- to large-scale printing operations. Their speed usually starts at about 500+ characters per second or 5+ lines per second and can be purchased with speeds of 10+ lines per second. These printers usually come with soundproof covers and can cost several thousand dollars to purchase.
The special feature that this type of printer has is that it can print on NCR paper, i.e. multiple copies or odd size paper, like post cards, etc., at extremely high speeds.
Bubble printers replaced the dot matrix printers for all low-speed or word processing applications. It comes with an impressive list of features:
Print at twice the speed of the dot matrix printer
Near laser quality output
20 to 30% less cost
Has color option for 30%+ price
Less expensive ribbons
Prints graphics
The only problem with bubble printers is that if you need two copies, you need to print two copies. This works fine for letters and short documents, but for documents as short as five page, this can cause you to wait an excessive amount of time to print the needed copies.
The special feature that this printer has is that it can provide laser quality output in black or color at a minimum price. Hewlett Packard is the market leader in this type of printer and makes an excellent product. Prices in this area run from $150.00 to $300.00, depending if the printer prints color and the dots per inch that printer is capable of.
Laser printers are the top of the line, they come in various speeds from 4 to 24 pages per minute for normal business correspondence. That is the same as between 352 and 2112 characters/second. The slowest laser is over 3 times faster then the dot matrix printer. The market leader for this type of printer is the Hewlett Packard Laser Jet 5, which prints 12 pages per minute. It costs approximately $1000.00 and will print a typical business page for less than 2 cents per page. This printer is fast enough to produce multiple copies in the same time it takes a dot matrix printer to print a single multi-part NCR document.
Now that you are an expert in printers, which printer should you buy. The answer, as always, depends upon how you plan to use the printer.
If you are doing business correspondence and some graphics work, the bubble printer is a good match. It gives you near laser quality, reasonable speed and the option for color.
If you are printing multi-part forms then the dot matrix printer is the best solution. Its use of NCR multiple part forms is the most cost effective printing mechanism.
If you are printing single part statements, invoices or operational reports, then the laser family of printers gives you the most cost-effective solution.
The printer is just a tool. And just like any tool, it can be forced to do a job it is not intended to do for some period of time. In the long run, it is always better to match the job and the tool.