Types of Multifunction Inkjet Printers
Colour printers
These printers use separate colour cartridges, red, yellow, blue and black (the acronym "CMYK" is often used), making them particularly suitable for printing images, photos, and colour documents.
Black and white printers
This type uses only a black toner/cassette for printing. This option is especially suitable for offices, schools and households, or if you are planning to print many text-based documents.
What to Look for When Choosing a Multifunction Inkjet Printer
Print speed
Print speed is one of the many features to consider when choosing a printer. Typically, it starts at 20 pages per minute (ppm) in black and about 10 ppm for colour prints, but the more expensive printers are able to print faster. The speed of printing for a home printer is usually not too important, but in the corporate environment, it's a good idea to choose printers with a higher printing speeds. Slow printing can be limiting to work productivity.
| Price category | Print Speed Black/White | Print Speed Colour |
| Budget | about 20 ppm | about 15 ppm |
| Mid-Range | about 30 ppm | about 20 ppm |
| Top-of-the-line | 35 ppm or more | 25 ppm or more |
First-page print time is the amount of time that elapses from clicking "Print" on the computer to the completed printing of the first page of the job. It is usually 5 to 20 seconds.
Print Resolution of a Multifunction Inkjet Printer
The resolution indicates the number of horizontal and vertical dots spaced in a one inch square. A higher resolution value means that more details have been transfered, and the final picture will be better. To print text documents, a resolution of 600 dpi is sufficient. With this resolution, the text is sharp and smooth enough for anyone's needs. Higher resolutions are better for printing photos.
- For printing documents and text, a resolution of 600 dpi is ample.
- For colour printing, it is best to print at the highest possible resolution (1200 dpi and above).
Printer Scanner Resolution
This value typically ranges from 300 to 4800 dpi. In general, the higher the scanner resolution, the better the resulting scanned image will appear on the computer. Note, however, that the size of the resulting file increases with the resolution.
- Images scanned at higher dpi values will take up more space, the files are sometimes more than 10MB.
- As resolution increases, the total scanning time increases.
Connecting Printer to PC
The most common way to connect a printer to your computer is via USB cable. More advanced models can be paired by WiFi, Bluetooth or a LAN network. The advantage of using a network connection is the ability to operate the printer from multiple computers at once. It also lets you print directly from a smart device such as a tablet or smartphone .
- USB connection - allows you to connect the printer to just one computer. The connection is seamless and stable.
- Wireless - allows you to connect multiple devices at once. Pairing is not always trouble-free.
Other Useful Features
- Double-sided or duplex - for manual duplex printing, you have to flip the paper to reprint the other side, but some machines are able to print on both sides of the paper.
- Borderless printing - allows you to print without a white border and use the full width of the paper.
- Scan to email - automatically assigns a scanned document to an email message.
- Automatic document feeder - the printer inserts pages when copying and scanning multi-page documents.
- Card reader/USB printing - print directly from an inserted memory card or USB drive.
- ePrint/Air Print - these are secure cloud services that allow you to print from anywhere with an active Internet connection.
