Fair Comparisons

Price is often the driving factor that determines whether a consumer decides to purchase one product over another similar one. When buying a printing machine, make sure you’re not getting less for the lower price you’re thinking of paying. For example, low-end laser printers sometimes ship with a starter cartridge that may have only one-third the page capacity of a normal cartridge. If the normal cartridge costs $75, you’ll actually pay $50 more for the starter-cartridge machine (because you’ll have to buy a new cartridge sooner) than a similar printer with a normal-capacity cartridge.

Do the machines you’re considering ship with a USB or parallel cable? If not, add the cost of buying a cable to the purchase price of the machine before making comparisons. ■

Cost Tamers

Monochrome laser printers have long been relied on to produce sharp text at lowest per-page costs while inkjets have dominated the market for high-quality photo printing. A change is under way. Now, even mid-priced color lasers ($500 or so) can produce good-quality images. And that price range is affordable for even the smallest offices. If you’re looking for a printer that can do it all—text and graphics— consider a new color laser. The more you move up the scale from mid-range, the closer you’ll get to photographic-quality prints. For both text and photos, you’ll minimize per-page printing costs since toner is less expensive than ink and laser printers need not use the high-cost glossy paper inkjets require to print good-quality photos. Call us to find out more!■

The traditional way to show someone a document without giving them the ability to change it is to print the document out and send it to the recipient by fax or snail mail. There’s a third way, though, that saves time, paper, ink or toner and postage or phone charges—PDF files sent as e-mail attachments.

The PDF (portable document format) file type, originally created by Adobe Systems, Inc., uses the PostScript printer description language to create an image of text and picture content. PDFs have the advantage of being readable across platforms, preserving original layout and fonts, and securing a document against alterations.

Anyone with Adobe Reader software (available for free download) or other PDF-reader software can access PDF files. To create PDF files, however, you’ll need to purchase Adobe Acrobat or other PDF-creation software.■

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