The first step at picking a small printer is understanding what exactly are they. Small printers either refer to literally small printers that don’t clog up your desktop desk all at once, or laptop printers that run on batteries. A few minutes spent on research will give you better results at choosing your next printer.
1. Make up your mind about the priorities. Do you want to carry the printer around in your backpack or is it fine if you can put it on the back seat of your car and print whenever you feel like printing? It doesn’t really matter yet, just decide what you want.
2. Color or black and white printer? Most small color inkjets give exceptional results compared to other solutions, but they don’t come cheap. A better model may cost you $200 or even more, and weight about five pounds. It prints more than 20 pages a minute in black and white mode so it’s not slow either.
3. Monochrome printers use one of two popular technologies. They either print with an inkjet cartridge or thermal printing technology. The latter is more or less what a fax machine does. It results in small outer size, but they need special heat sensitive paper to be able to print.
4. Keep in mind that these printers are not for heavy duty utilization. If you want one that can print more than 500 pages a month, you will have to keep an eye open, as most of these devices are rated at or below that. Some casual printing on the go, but no serious reproduction or even office work. Most small offices don’t print more than that, but it still needs to be taken into consideration.
5. Pick the brand. The brand decides a lot of things in a printer. After sales support, cartridge supplies, prices of spare parts, reliability. Many things are affected by the brand of the printer. Most prominent players are HP and Canon, but since Canon has been the market leader, checking out their website is more than recommended.
Picking a small printer, or laptop printer will always be a more pricey choice than going for the desktop version. Desktop printers don’t fit into the glove box of your car all that often and when you need to print something on the go, there is no better solution than these mini inkjets.
