Skip the Store with Your Own Photo Printer

Whenever people want photos from their camera printed out, they probably go to a drug or grocery store and come back in a day or two to pick it up. With the advent of digital cameras, people could suddenly print photos right from the comfort of their own home. Unfortunately, the quality was not equal to that of photo centers at first because of both low quality digital cameras and printers. In the years since, digital cameras and printers have come down in price while having greatly increased quality, and a type of printer called the photo printer has made its debut.

Print Direct

Anybody can use a photo printer as long as they have a digital camera (often even disposable models). These printers don't require computers to print out beautiful photos at popular sizes, although you'll need to purchase special paper to get that glossy finish. Some of the downsides of doing your own photo printing is that photos require a lot of ink, so be prepared to replace the ink cartridges after not a terribly large amount of photos. However, it's a trade off between photo printers and photo centers.

Therefore, you need to decide if owning a photo printer is right for you. If you print out a lot of photos, then you will save money over the long run by printing them out yourself. However, if you only print photos perhaps once every few months or so, then you ought to save yourself the money and just take your digital camera into the photo center whenever you need them printed off. After all, a photo printer will run you about $150 for a decent model, so you should only make the purchase if you're going to get a good amount of use out of it.

If you're one of those folks who only prints photos out from time to time, then perhaps you might want to check out an all in one photo printer. These printers have the added benefit of being able to actually copy photos as well, so you're essentially buying a Xerox machine in addition to a photo printer. However, these generally cost a little more, but the printing quality is still top notch. Everyone needs to make copies every once in a while, so this is one tool that everyone can get use out of. When choosing a photo printer, you need to pick one that roughly lines up with the quality of your camera – there really isn't any point in buying a high-end photo printer and pairing it up with a disposable camera. If you purchase the camera that fits your equipment and your printing style, you'll get the best performance for the printer's cost.

Color Laser Printer Comparison Websites: A Review

There's websites devoted to every topic that you can think of and quite a few that you wish you hadn’t. There are many websites devoted to color laser printer comparisons. They don’t actually write the reviews and generally do make any color laser printer comparisons themselves. What they do is review the color laser printer comparisons made on other websites. Join me, why don’t you, even if you're not currently looking for a photo printer?

It Does What It Says On The Tin

There's a famous series of advertisements in England for a certain paint brand that always ends with the slogan, "Does what it says on the tin". You can find this kind of philosophy on many color laser printer comparison websites, such as ColorLaserPrinterReviews.com. It really doesn’t give you much leeway into determining what the site is all about.

ColorLaserPrinterReviews.com is an easy to read site with large font – something sadly missing in many other websites, not just color laser printer comparison websites. Although they welcome reviews written by others, most of their reviews were written by themselves (gasp). Of course, there are a lot of ads, but they are rather discreet and do not detract from the text and images.

ConsumerSearch

This is one of those color laser printer comparison websites that I mentioned that has teeny-tiny print. When you get your glasses on, you'll see that ConsumerSearch isn’t just devoted to printers, but to all kinds of crap. They just have excellent SEO tactics to make you think in the search engine listing that you are going to a site exclusively about color printers.

They are a bit of a "reviewer's digest" in that they glean their materials froma wide variety of sources. Websites cited for their contributions to the color printers pages on ConsumerSearch include PC Magazine, PC World, Consumer Reports magazine, CNet, Government Computer News, PCPro and ITReviews.com

There is so much information her on this site that you need to get a drink, comfy shoes and turn the sign on your doorknob to "Do Not Disturb". Granted, it can be overwhelming at times, but if you don’t have a lot of time to physically go to stores or deal with sales reps, this site is a viable alternative.

My favorite part about ConsumerSearch is that they prominently give the dates of all the reviews on their site. This cuts out a lot of guesswork about how relevant a review is.

Your Mom Has The Best Laser Printer Review For You

Getting your own all in one printer for your home or business is a big deal, even if there is a great sale going on at the local office supply store.  You need to make as careful a color laser printer comparison as you would for your car, your health insurance or for any other major purchase.  Or, you could just ask your Mom (or other close relative) for their laser printer reviews.  

My Story

When I went into freelance writing, I didn’t have a good printer.  It soon became apparent that an all in one printer was essential for not only my business, but for my sanity.  I thought I'd do just what I advise my readers to do when making any big purchase.  Go to the websites written by geeks and read all the laser printer reviews you can.  You can also go to customer ratings websites like Epinions or PriceGrabber for laser printer reviews written by the average person.

After spending hours going over these laser printer reviews, I came to the conclusion that a Brother printer would be best.  I told my Mom.  She promptly told me that all of those laser printer reviews were full of it.  She told me that the best copiers and printers in her job were made by Hewlett-Packard.  My Mom worked at GlaxoSmithKline, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

I got the Hewlett-Packard.  It's the best printer I've ever touched.  Perhaps my Mom should go on these customer ratings websites and write up some laser printer reviews.  

Selecting Your Source

When selecting someone else to make the pivotal laser printer review for you, be sure this person knows you very well and knows why you want the laser printer.  Is it for school work, for printing out photos or for a home business?  That information is actually more important than how much they know about laser printers.   They will know how much you will put up with before your temper explodes.  This is a point of information usually missing from many online laser printer reviews.

It would help if this person also worked in an office or listened to the gossip of friends who worked in an office.  Worse comes to worse, you Mom will probably be more than happy to get her office worker friends to give you their laser printer reviews, and then your Mom will already have one picked out for you, whether you've asked her to or not.

Best Laser Printer For Copier Art

Copier art is a modern form of creative expression that can produce some really beautiful, humorous and eye-opening images. It's very much like Photoshop art, instead it's usually a lot easier to use. There are a lot of variations of copier art, but on the whole, you use images like collages placed together to make one page of eye candy. All of these images have to be placed through a copier. Large, business-type copiers make the best laser printers for this type of emerging urban art form.

What About Home Machines?

Small, all-in one printers do not make the best laser printer for your copier art needs. Usually, in a small home all in one printer, there is only enough space to insert one page at a time in order to scan. Your taped on or pasted on copier art images will fall apart in these kinds of machines.

Copy Centers

The best laser printers for copier art follow the adage "bigger is better". You need to use huge copiers that are about as big as a refrigerator. These can be found in offices, local libraries and copy centers. Some connoisseurs of copier art say that the best laser printer art can only be done using only materials thrown out by other people. And if you use the best laser printer in a university library, those are going to be very interesting images, indeed.

Toner Addiction

Also, according to some laser printer reviews, you should ideally use a large business printer because they generally don’t have the smell of toner, which can be quite addicting for some people. Whether you can get addicted to toner is still a matter of debate, but there does seem to be an unstudied correlation between the best laser printer artists and an addictive personality.

Dot Matrix

Some connoisseurs of copier art will go so far as to say that the best laser printer for copier art is NO laser printer. They champion the use of the old dot matrix printers, which are a bit blurry and usually print only in black and white. They argue that a dot matrix can disguise the obvious cut out lines that can be easily seen on art from laser printers.

Critics of these copier art connoisseurs say that they need to lighten up and maybe go sniff some toner. The point of copier art is to have a laugh, not to make front page reviews in The New York Times.

Confessions Of A Multifunction Laser Printer Owner

I own a Hewlett-Packard Officejet 4300 series multifunction laser printer. It can copy, print, fax and slice tomatoes. At least, I think it slices tomatoes. I'm not too sure. When I've decided that the time has come to put my multifunction laser printer out to pasture, I'll send a cherry tomato through the Scan function and see what happens. And that's my first confession. My HP multifunction laser printer is in the prime of its life and I'm already thinking about throwing a wake for it.

I Haven't Used The Fax Yet

I'm not going to tell you how long I've had my printer, but I will tell you that it is the best laser printer I've ever come across in my life. However, as the subheading shows, I have yet to figure out how to use the fax machine function. Not that I really want to ever use a fax machine, but my Dad wants me to.

Let me explain. Dad is the one who bought the multifunction laser printer for me one Christmas. He graciously dipped into his own wallet to buy me a multifunction laser printer for my home business that he will never use. This is a really big toy and the odds of me ever letting him touch it are astronomically slim. My Dad is the world's best Dad, but he doesn’t get along well with anything that has buttons.

I happen to not like fax machines. They sit there and blink at me and spit out spax (spam fax). It's hard not to take it personally. So, I am determined to never use the fax function in my multifunction laser printer, even though my Dad paid for this function. I'm thinking of telling him I use it even though I don’t. It's not exactly lying – it's more of a shareholder appeasement speech.

Where Does The Ink Go?

99% of my multifunctional laser printer actions are for business and charity purposes. The other 1% is for printing out huge pictures of Peter Gabriel that no one will ever see but me. Sometimes I use the pictures as book marks, sometimes I tape them up to the wall and sometimes I cut them out and stick them in a photo album.

However, about 99% of the ink of my multifunctional laser printer goes to these Peter Gabriel pictures instead of the 99% of the things that I'm supposed to be doing to keep a house to hang Peter Gabriel pictures in. This is what keeps me from stark raving mad. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.