In order to be able to produce your own hard copy graphics, documents and pictures from your PC you will need to purchase a printer. Although most computers will come with a printer already packaged you may find that it will be low on features and the quality of printing may not be up to your standards. There are several different types of printer on the market which you could purchase: inkjet printers, laser printers, snapshot/digital photo printers and all-in-one machines. So how should you go about treating yourself to a new printer? With the following tips you will learn what to look for in terms of printer speed, connectivity, quality and features.

First you should decide which of the aforementioned printer types you wish to go for. You should base this decision on how often you use your printer. In general, inkjet printers are the least expensive type of printer, however they are rather slow. They use both black and colour ink cartridges and would be ideal for smaller print jobs. Laser printers are considerably faster than their inkjet counterparts and use a toner, which is a powerdered form of printer ink that lasts longer than ink cartridges. This sort of printer will be ideal for large text document print jobs. All-in-one printers will enable you to perform printing as well as scanning, copying and faxing. These types of printers may use either ink cartridges or toners. Digital printers are best used for printing high quality digital photos.

Next you need to examine the printing speed. This is measured in pages per minute (ppm) so one which is advertised at a speed of 11ppm will take much longer to print a single page than a printers which runs at 30ppm. Colour printers will have 2 different printing speeds - one for grayscale printing and one for colour printing. Photo printers and inkjet printers will be the slowest as they rely highly on quality colour prints whereas laser printers and all-in-one printers will have the fastest printing speeds. You should aksi bear in mind that the total time required for a particular print job will also be affected by the delay the printer experiences before it begins a print job.

The enxt task is to review the printer's options for connectivity. If your setup will consist of several PCs sharing one printer then it may be wise to purchase a printer that has a wireless connectivity option. All new printers use a USB cable to connect to the PC and will typically require that you purchase this cable separately. If you are buying an older computer then it is more likely that you will have to buy a parallel cable port in addition to a USB port.

Print quality is obviously going to be a very important factor. Printers with the best print quality are the ones which have a high resolution. This can be gauged by the dpi (dots per inch) measurement. Printers that have a high dpi will print smoothly, clearly and with more accurate colour definition. If you decide to purchase a photo printer then you should go for a printer with as high a dpi as you can afford, especially if you are looking to print larger photos.

Finally you should compare the additional features that come with the printer. The best printers should offer a wide selection of features and options in addition to excellent print quality and good printing speed. If you buy a printer with a memory card slot then you will be able to insert the memory card from your camera and print off the pictures immediately. Some other useful features to look out for are double sided printing, document feeders (on all-in-one) machines and several trays for feeding paper for large print jobs.