Ink Jet Printer Specifications

The speed at which the printer prints to a page will be listed under the term pages per minute, or ppm. These figures can be problematic for consumers, however, as printer vendors frequently cite ratings based on printing only the simplest text documents or printing at a low resolution, such as in draft mode. Speeds listed on the box, therefore, can be up to three times faster than the reality.
Top level inkjets will boast of up to 20ppm in monochrome (draft quality), and 12ppm in color, but if you're looking at a mid-range product, expect to see figures from 8ppm to 16ppm in monochrome, and 1.2ppm to 12ppm in color (draft to best quality printing modes).

The quality of the print from a printer is indicated by its resolution. Resolution refers to the number of dots in a square inch (dots per inch or dpi) that a printer can spit out onto a sheet of paper.

Inkjets generally have a maximum color resolution of 2400x1200dpi, with some high-end models boasting of up to 4800x1200dpi. But even if you plan to print a full-color 8x10in photograph, you're unlikely to see any significant improvement once you get above 1200x1200dpi. In addition, many printers employ 'optimized dpi', which involves the use of software and proprietary technologies to interpolate an image and to smooth out patches of color, fill in gaps, and sharpen more detailed sections. Such enhancements can affect print quality as much as the printer's resolution.

Just as important as a printer's resolution is the size of the ink droplets it deposits on the paper. Just about every photo printer on the market is capable of producing droplets sizes measuring four picolitres or less (one picolitre is the equivalent of one billionth of a liter). Much smaller than this and the droplets will be imperceptible to the human eye.

Unlike with laser printers, inkjet users won't be able to upgrade the built-in RAM capabilities of their printers. These types of devices rely on technology which requires the PC to render pages before sending them to the printer. In other words, the processing of the data happens on the PC, not the printer, as is the case with laser printers. This means that there is no need for large amounts of RAM to be included in the printer itself, and upgrading memory is redundant.

The rule of thumb for deciding which type suits your needs is this: if the majority of your printing will be text and the occasional photo, then a printer between $150 and $300 should be able to fulfill the task. In most cases, you can simply select the printer that will be most cost-effective to run based on the cost of consumables (more on these later). Even the cheapest inkjet models on the market nowadays can produce decent-looking photo printouts on specialty papers, and all excel in producing crisp, clean text.