Choosing a printer depends on a lot of factors. You must consider the cost of paper and the type of toner you want, and you also need to look at the running costs. These are based on the number of pages you will need to print per cartridge. In general, you should expect to pay around 20 cents per A4 page for a monochrome printer, and about 6c for a color laser printer. But the price per page of a laser printer can go down dramatically as you get a higher-end model.

Color laser printers use a mixture of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks to produce a printed image. In order to print color, the printer will preprocess all four toner layers before printing. The printer will store these four CMYK toner layers as separate bitmaps. Then each toner layer is applied to the combined layers in a uniform, single step. In some cases, a color laser printer uses multiple rollers.

If you want to print on both sides of the paper, you will need a printer that can accommodate duplexing. Some models are available with USB ports, so you can print from a computer or mobile device. You can also opt for a printer that supports Google Cloud Print or other popular cloud services. Having a printer that supports Cloud Print means you can print from a Google Drive account, and you can use the HP Instant Ink program to subscribe to a service that will automatically deliver high-quality toner to your printer.

The price per page of a laser printer is lower than that of an inkjet printer, but you’ll need to spend more money upfront. The cost of toner is a big factor in the price of a laser printer. Buying toner instead of ink will also save you money. In addition to toner, you will need to buy the drum unit, which is used to keep the toner cartridges charged. This drum unit will be replaced after three to four toner cartridges are refilled.

The raster memory on a printer needs to be large enough to hold all of the pages that the printer will be printing. This means that you will need at least four megabytes of memory for a monochrome printer and at least 16 megabytes for a color printer. In some cases, you will need to purchase a special vacuum cleaner with a high-efficiency filter, called an ESD-safe, to clean your printer. This will help protect your office from airborne contaminants.

For duplex printing, you’ll need to buy a longer paper path. You may also need to purchase a longer-reaching paper tray. Depending on the manufacturer, you can either buy a tray that can handle envelopes, or you can use an automatic feeding system. Most color laser printers have two or more laser scanner assemblies.

You can also print from your computer or mobile device using Google Cloud Print or other popular cloud services. You can also download a mobile app from the printer’s manufacturer.