Print'em at home
A simple guide to select the best printer for your home.
Know your printers
This section provides you basic knowledge of all the kinds of printers
that are available in the market for home usage.
There are three mainstream types of printers that are available in the Indian market.
They are: Inkject, Ink Tank & Laser Printers.
Each of them have a different printing aprroach and purpose which they cater to.
Read below to know more about them.
1
Inkjet
The cartridge is a small campsule that holds ink on a mechanical arm of the printer. The relatively low capacity of the cartridge leads to lower yields.
They make use of...
Ink Cartridge
2
Ink Tank
The ink tank printers are a better version of the cartridge printers. They have a tank or an ink bucket which has a higher capacity and longer idle life.
They make use of...
Ink Bottles
3
Laser Printer
They comprises of a toner which holds ink in amorphour form. The powder is projected on the sheet and is passed through a curing light to settle the ink.
They make use of...
Toner
Market Analysis
The following narrative is contextual to the Indian market as of 2022. The market is dominated by 4 major players namely HP, Epson, Canon & Brother.
The data is manually collected for this narrative. The below plotted Sunburst is the market offering visualisation of the printers from each of the companies.
Analysing the costs of each company's offering
Note: This chart is a product of a small data-set
The lower range of printers are dominated by Ink Cartridge printers
and later range by Ink Tank, followed by Laser Printers
What are you looking for in a printer?
There are many factors to look into before buying a printer. This article will help you choose a printer based on the
operational factors of the printer. The major ones are mention below.
Speed of printingQuantity of printsCost per print
Choose one factor or scroll down to know more about them
The factors to consider
before buying a printer (ofc alongside the cost!)
1
PPM (Prints/Minute)
a.k.a Speed of printings
The performance of a priter is highly dependent on the speed at which it provides prints. Although not the most crutial KPI for a home printer, it is relevant across multiple domains of usage.
2
Yield
a.k.a Quantity of prints
Yield or pages/fill is a metric which indicates how many pages the printer can printer after a new batch of ink or cartridge is loaded into it. It is direclty proportionate to the ink capacity of the new fill.
3
CPP (Cost/Print)
a.k.a Cost per print
This is arguably the most important KPI for the Indian market. Firstly, the inital investment for the printer and the second is the operational chanrges i.e the cost per print. It is usually lower in ink tank printers.
Speed of printing
Speed of printing is determined by the number of pages a printer can print with-in one minute. It is also known as Prints Per Minute (PPM).
The circles with the bigger radius indicate the printers with higher prints per minute.
The key takeaways from the above visualisation is
Ink tank & laserjet printers have a faster printing rate.
Ink tank printers print an avg. of 17 PPM and laserjet print an avg. of 27 PPM
Also know about other features, else skip to summary
Quantity of printsCost per printSummary
Quantity of prints
Every printer has an ink reservoir. The amount of ink this reservoir holds and the efficiency with which the printer uses that ink determines the
number of sheets it can print on a whole. The number of pages a printer can print with a full tank is called its yield.
The key takeaways from the above visualisation is
Ink tank printers have a higher yield than other types of printers.
They can print anywhere between 6,000 to 18,000 black & white pages in one fill.
Also know about other features, else skip to summary
Speed of printingCost per printSummary
Cost per print
Arguably the most important feature people consider before buying a printer, after cost of the printer itself, is the cost per print.
It is closely related to the price of ink and quantity of ink available in the cartridge. Some printers are also optimised to utilize lesser ink.
The key takeaways from the above visualisation is
Ink tank printers print a black & white page from anywhere between ₹0.07 t0 ₹0.25!
That is about 35 times cheaper than inkjet printer's avg. print price.
Also know about other features, else skip to summary
Speed of printingQuantity of printsSummary
We can say that Ink Tank printers
are going for the win!
Although they fall in a higher price range of Rs. 10K - 20K, they are more efficient.
Laser printers have a better speed than InkJet printers but lack in features and versatility.
Spacial comparison of printer price,
speed of printing and cost of printing.
Note: This chart is a product of a small data-set
I'm going for the Brother DCP-T226
Choose your printer ...
The following study doesn't take into consideration the service centers,
physical preferences and power consumption of the printer.
Static Poster of printing.
Select the Static Poster in the navigation to see a high-res version.
Downlaod the dataset from here
Hope this helps you buy the best printer :)
by Karthikeya GS, Information Design'21, NID Bangalore
