Printer type
Three technologies dominate personal printers: inkjet, laser, and LED (light-emitting diode). Using replaceable cartridges, personal inkjet printers cost the least, print slowly, and often produce impressive color output. Laser and LED printers are more like photocopiers producing crisp, fast printouts.
Output type
Want to print lots of monochrome pages? Buy a laser or LED printer for its speed and low cost of consumables. Need affordable color? Get an inkjet printer. Photo-quality inkjets generally produce the best homemade color photos, but be forewarned: They usually print slower than your average inkjets (which are slow to begin with). Don’t buy an inkjet just to save money, though; the price up front will be lower than that of a laser, but the cost of an inkjet’s color cartridges and coated paper add up quickly.
Maximum resolution
Personal laser printers produce 600 dots per inch (dpi)–sufficient resolution to create crisp, monochrome output. Inkjet printers typically claim output resolutions of 1,200dpi or 2,400dpi, but the sharpness isn’t comparable to that of lasers. Generally, you should ignore inkjet dpi claims and compare actual printouts when possible.
Installed memory
Personal printers typically need little memory. Inkjets require a tiny amount–just enough to hold the row of dots being printed and maybe a little more. Laser and LED printers are page printers, which means that they must render an entire page in memory before printing.
Maximum speed
Measured in pages per minute (ppm), this specification is always exaggerated. Laser printers generally print text pages only slightly slower than the manufacturers’ claims. But the claims for inkjets are typically at low-quality settings using very simple text pages–in other words, a speed you’ll never see in real life.
OS support
This is a bigger issue than you might imagine. A few printers lack Mac support entirely, and a number of manufacturers take their time before offering drivers that are fully compatible with the latest version of Windows. Companies that shy away from producing new drivers in a timely fashion may arbitrarily shorten the useful life of your printer.