The line between lower-priced commercial color printers for small business and high-end personal color printers is becoming more blurred all the time. The good thing is that you have more choices for digital printing than ever before, but the huge array of choices can be daunting. Like most business purchases, quality and price will be big determinants in how you address your small business full color printing needs. You’ll most likely be choosing between laser commercial color printers and inkjet commercial color printers.
Inkjet printers squirt miniscule dots of color onto paper, while laser printers have a more complicated printing process.
Inkjet printers
When researching commercial color printers for small business, check out the market with color inkjet printers if you’re not sure whether you need laser printing. Features are constantly increasing and improving, and costs tend to drop as technologies mature. Each dot made by an inkjet printer is usually between 50 and 60 micrometers in diameter, which is smaller than the thickness of a human hair. Resolutions of up to 1440 x 720 dots per inch are possible, and the dots are combined to create a full color print photo quality when the printer is set on its highest resolution setting.
There are two top inkjet technologies used by manufacturers of inkjet commercial color printers: thermal bubble and piezoelectric.
Thermal bubble
Thermal bubble technology is used by Hewlett Packard and Canon. These business printers are sometimes called bubble jet printers. In these printers, small resistors make heat, which vaporizes ink to create a tiny bubble. As the bubble gets bigger, some of the ink is pushed through a nozzle and onto the printing paper. The bubble collapses, and a vacuum results. This pulls more ink from the cartridge into the print head. Most bubble jet business printers have 300 to 600 nozzles, all of which can shoot a droplet of ink at the same time.
Piezoelectric
Piezoelectric full color printing is a technique that was patented by Epson. It uses piezo crystals, located in the back of each nozzle’s ink reservoir. The crystal receives an electric charge that makes it vibrate, either inwardly or outwardly. When the crystal vibrates inwardly, it causes a small amount of ink to come out of the nozzle. When it vibrates outwardly, it pulls more ink into the ink reservoir to replace the ink that was just squirted out.
When you print something using an inkjet printer, first the control circuits activate the paper feed. After the paper is fed into the printer and positioned properly, the print head motor uses its belt to move the print head across the page. Every time the print head shoots dots of ink onto the paper, the print head pauses, but it happens so fast that it seems as if the print head is moving continuously. Each time the print head pauses, multiple dots are created from the cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black) colors in prescribed amounts for full color printing. After each pass across the page, the stepper motor advances the paper a tiny bit, and the print head reverses direction and moves back across the page, printing as it goes. After the printing is done, the print head is parked and the paper feed pushes the completed page into the output tray. In most cases, the ink dries fast enough that you can pic k up the color business card, brochure, or post card immediately without smudging it.
Business Inkjet Printer Examples
Epson
One example of a commercial inkjet printer is the Epson WorkForce 600 is a multifunction printer that includes a copier, fax, scanner, and photo printer. Its goal is to be as zippy as a laser printer while making great quality inkjet photos. It comes with Wi-Fi, USB, and Ethernet connectivity, and can be made to serve a small workgroup with wireless connections for tasks like full color printing, scanning, cleaning print heads, and gauging ink levels.
Except for scanning, most tasks can be done by just using the control panel on the printer itself. It has a small LCD screen that flips out of a panel in the middle that allows users to scan, copy, fax, or view and print uploaded photos from one of the three memory card slots. Epson’s “Extra-high Capacity” ink cartridges claim to give you 3.5 times as many printouts for less than twice the cost of standard ink cartridges. Though this printer isn’t as fast as a laser printer, it is fast for an inkjet printer, at up to 60% faster than other Epson inkjet commercial color printers.
Hewlett Packard
The HP OfficeJet J4680 ($130) is another multifunction inkjet printer with a built in fax machine, a 20-sheet document feeder, and scan and copy capabilities. Special setup features include installation of the HP Inkjet Utility Widget that gives users a quick glance at ink supply and lets you launch the standard HP printer maintenance utility software. After you install print cartridges, the printer asks you to insert paper so it can print out an alignment page. But rather than analyzing this test yourself, you put the paper onto the scanner and press “OK.” Then the scanner tells the printer if any adjustments need to be made.
The printer has two ink cartridges: black and tri-color that are supposed to yield 200 and 360 prints. HP sells high-yield black cartridges for slightly less than twice the price of the standard ink cartridges that are supposed to yield 700 pages rather than 2 00. It is simple to set up an office wireless print network – practically plug-and-play. The prints are generally of good quality, but the full color printing can be slow. But overall it’s a good, reasonably priced example of commercial color printers for small business.
Color Laser Printers
Laser commercial color printers work using static electricity, just like the kind that makes socks stick together after being in a dryer. It is just an electrical charge built up on some object that is insulated. Oppositely charged static electricity fields cling together. Laser printers use static electricity as a temporary “glue.” The laser printer contains a photoreceptor, which is a revolving cylinder made out of photoconductive material that can be discharged by photons.
A charged corona wire or a charged roller in the laser printer first gives the drum a total positive charge. As the cylinder revolves, the laser printer shines a laser beam across the surface, discharging certain points. This causes the laser to draw the letters and images to be printed as patterns of electrical charges. When the pattern is created, the printer coats the cylinder with toner, which has a positive charge, causing it to cling to the negative discharged areas of the cylinder. the cylinder rolls over a sheet of paper moving on a belt. Before the paper goes under the cylinder, it is given a negative charge by the corona wire or charged roller. This allows the paper to pull the toner powder away from where it isn’t needed. And it all happens very quickly, allowing you to improve output operations significantly.
Dell
Dell makes the 5130CDN color laser printer that can handle high volume with near-perfect print quality. If you download an e-book, you can easily print your book. Though the machine itself costs around $1,500, the cost per page is low enough to save money in the long run. It is very fast: 25.2 pages per minute printing text. . The main tray holds 550 sheets of paper, and additional trays are available. The navigation is intuitive, and the printer’s internal HTML configuration site lets you change the settings using a web browser. This is a workhorse among multifunction printers that has a standard 9,000 page black cartridge and 6,000 page yellow, cyan, and magenta cartridges. High yield ink cartridges can get the cost of a black and white page down to slightly under 1 cent and full color pages down to 2 cents per color (or 6.9 cents for a four-color page).
Lexmark
Lexmark’s C734DN color laser printer is fast, full of features, and has low toner prices, so you can improve output operations without going broke. Plain black text prints at 27.6 pages per minute. Graphic design pages were slower, but still faster than most. Some users have noticed oversaturation of colors at the highest quality settings, but the default settings produce vivid, high quality prints. It does, however come with color management utilities with the driver that may be used to rectify the problems at the highest quality print settings. It comes with a standard 550 sheet input, with optional extra trays available. Letter and legal print formats can be automatically duplexed, and the multipurpose tray (standard) can handle banner paper of up to 36 inches long. The control panel has a tiltable monochrome LCD with all the expected navigation controls.
The commercial printer business is highly competitive, and manufacturers are adding features (and usually dropping prices) regularly. You can spend in the hundreds of dollars for a commercial inkjet printer, or in the thousands of dollars for a commercial color laser printer. Laser printers do have the advantage of low per-page costs, however, compared to inkjet printers. Commercial color printers for small business are as necessary to today’s offices as internet connectivity, and fortunately, their prices are becoming more reasonable all the time.
Digital printing, whether you want to print business cards, post cards, business forms, or you want to print your book on-demand, is a necessity even for the smallest businesses. Brochure printing and presentation folders can be made in-house with today’s commercial color printers for small business. While they may not be the ultimate full color printing solution, some of the higher end laser printers can create fairly large banners, and with a high quality laser printer or inkjet printer, you can avoid having to use a printing company for some of the jobs you might have used them for in years past.