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When the pandemic struck, many of you had printers that were designed for home use, rather than those that were office/enterprise quality — similar in features and durability to those you might have been used to having access to in your physical office. There is a difference.
Most of that difference isn’t necessarily in the features. Even $99 multi-function printers (MFPs) from a big box store can scan, copy, print and sometimes fax, though, if you need fax capability, it may be a bit costlier.
There are some differences between a printer suitable for printing homework, and one used frequently for business use. One of the more important differences is durability. Home-oriented and priced printers simply weren’t designed to print lots of pages and last a long time. That’s not to say you won’t get lucky, but if you frequently need hard copy — and many of us still do despite the inevitable shift to digital documents — you really don’t want to wind up in a situation where you need important and urgent output just to have a flaky home-oriented print machine decide it’s the perfect time to go wonky, or just give up the ghost.
But even if you’re headed back to the office, whether in a full-time or hybrid mode, the most important thing you need from your equipment is reliability — and that costs money. It used to be that you could get some idea of how durable a printer or MFP was by looking at the duty cycle and the recommended number of pages per month the manufacturer supplied. Most printer manufacturers no longer list a duty cycle — you have to figure out the intended market for a particular device from whatever marketing material is available. Another indicator is the length of the warranty, and how the vendor states it handles warranty work. An office-quality print device will generally have a warranty of three years or more.
Ink or toner yield is another indicator. If the printer that you have or are looking to purchase has ink or toner yields of several hundred pages, rather than several thousand, it probably wasn’t designed for professional use.
But what's currently happening is that many of the printer vendors have realized that you’re unlikely to spend a thousand dollars or more on an enterprise-level print device for WFA use. So, they are introducing and/or promoting printers and MFPs that aren’t quite as durable, or expensive, as enterprise-level devices, but are much hardy than the throwaway quality printers many of us are still using. HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 series is a good example of a professional-level print device that will churn out lots of pages without needing you to take a hammer to the piggy bank.
Epson has printers, with both standard ink cartridges and its refillable Eco-Tank Pro line, that also reside in this professional-yet-affordable zone. None of these are inexpensive, but are priced in the $400-$600 range. But both these printers have page yields in the 7,000-to-10,000-page range, with heavy-duty warranties. And both these vendors, and several others, have ink and toner plans that essentially give you several years’ worth of ink or toner with the initial purchase.
One other thing to consider when thinking about upgrading your print device is that even at home, you may not want sensitive documents sitting around in the output tray. When you get to professional-level print devices, most of them have the ability to hold and release jobs. Essentially, the print jobs are held in memory until a release code is entered at the print console, at which time the job is printed. It’s a nice feature to have when you don’t want other people in the house to see sensitive printouts, or have a young child decide that the stack of checks you’ve just printed would make a terrific canvas for their latest crayon masterpiece.
The bottom line is that you might be just fine with an inexpensive printer or MFP, but if there’s anything that the past year has shown, it’s always good to be prepared for the unexpected.
