[bindudhindsa]

I am running a small business , Looking for a good small business multifunction printer. Looking for all options in one machine

Scanner, Copier, Printer and Fax

My priorities are

1) Speed
2) Toner prices
3) Receive and send fax effectively
4) have different trays for different paper sizes upto 11*17
5) Have option to change files to pdf
6) Have ability to send email

Please suggest me any good one

Please share your views , few companies are offering me to lease a printer , is this a good option or should i buy one ??

 

[godspeeed]

Hi bindudhindsa,

I cant recommend any product for you but I can provide you with some technical information that can help you make a better choice:

1) Printing speed: If you are concerned about speed consider the connection type, this can greatly affect printing speed (parallel vs USB vs wireless).

2) Toner price: Be careful with recycled toners. There are ways you can increase the life span of toners and drums, like stack print jobs and send them all at the same time. Most machine will have a warmup process and calibration process that will rotate toner and drum rollers before and after the print job, this affects the total amount of copies you can have from a cartridge. If you print 100 jobs of 1 copies per day, your printer calibrates a 100 times, if you print 1 job of 100 copies per day, your printer calibrates 1 time.

3) Faxing: If you have a color machine, make sure it can send and receive fax if your out of a color cartridge. Make sure your fax machine supports Digital lines if you are not on analog signal (VOIP, etc.)

4) Ledger: I have not heard of a home usage printer that supports ledger except for some inkjet models from Brother, for laser machine I dont think you will find anything.

5) PDF: Every scanning programs I know allows you to create PDF documents.

6) EMAILS: Be sure to make the difference between sending a scanned document to an e-mail client program to manually send it and sending scanned documents directly to an email server (POP3 / SMTP, etc.) where every documents will be sent to a configured e-mail address, and can be retrieved from an e-mail client such as Outlook. Some machines can even support scanning to servers and FTPs.

 

[bindudhindsa]

Wow !! that's such an awesome information Godspeeed, Thanks for your effort and time .
about the speed, wireless will be my first choice , i m buying it for my small business so trying to make less cluttering from wires , please let me know which one is better speed wise between parallal, usb or wireless.

what exactly is ledger in printers ?

please explain me this too when you said "Make sure your fax machine supports Digital lines if you are not on analog signal (VOIP, etc.) "

Thanks again for such a valuable information. It is very helpful

 

[godspeeed]

Hi,


To answer your questions,


Ledger is the common name for 11 x 17 inches documents.

Wireless printing can be either very slow or very fast, it is difficult to cover everything that can affect the wireless signal strength so it is a risk for you to take. You definitely don't want to use a Parallel cable, they are obsolete and have a very slow data transfer speed.

You must also take into account the time it takes for the first page to be printed, as a general rule, laser printers will have a higher page per minute speed but with the warmup process can take up to 30 seconds which will give you a delay before the first page. Inkjets will start printing right away but will not give you the same printing speed. The question you need to ask yourself is ''am I printing a few large print jobs per day (laser)'' or ''am I printing multiple 1-2 pages jobs per day (ink jet)''.

Contact your phone company and ask them if you have an analog or digital phone service. If you are on a digital line you need to purchase a fax machine that supports slow bodrate fax transfers. This means you can adjust the data transmission speed to allow a proper transition from analog data to digital data. The data will be transmitted from analog to digital and then back to analog.. If the transmission is too fast the translation will not happen and you will get communication errors.


Good luck!