When Should You Buy A New Printer

Remember when you bought the printer you are currently using? How excited were you to tear open its factory wrap?

Do you remember how contentful you felt watching the first paper roll out of the printer with the exact text on your computer screen sitting there on its surface?

As great as printers are and as satisfying as it is to watch them print precisely what you tell them to, they cannot work forever. At some point, you will have to get a new one.

So, when should you buy a new printer? Several indicators show that your printer is aging or past its prime and needs to be changed. Indicators do not refer to an actual printer device that magically lets you know if you should change your printer.

Still, they are signs and symptoms just as a doctor would see in you and tell you what is wrong in your body. Read on to find out all you need to know about when a printer requires a fix or when you need to buy a new one.

1. It Makes No Economic Sense

You expect every device you buy to serve you more than it costs you to use it. The chances are that you expect the same in a printer, and that makes perfect sense.

Suppose you need a printer for Cricut projects and personal use to print pictures because photography is a hobby you decided to try. The best printer to use in that case is an inkjet printer because they spit out ink in its liquid form to make images, and the result is always crisp-looking.

Suppose again that you decide to pick another hobby and drop photography for a while. Say this new hobby is writing.

As a writer, you will need to print a lot of written text, and often too. Well, you already have a printer you used for printing pictures, so why not just use that to print your articles? This hypothetical case is an example of when you need to get a printer because using the one you have makes no economic sense.

An inkjet printer is best used for picture-printing and vinyl stickers, and because of how its ink system is designed, you will use a lot of ink in printing. It made sense to use an inkjet for printing regardless of the ink issue because a laserjet would not give you the kind of quality you get with it. 

However, when you decided to switch to using the inkjet for writing, it no longer made economic sense.

This is because laserjets are better and cheaper for heavy-duty text printing. You will not be changing your ink cartridge as quickly as you will with an inkjet. In this case, a new printer is your best option because two ink cartridges can set you back the price of a laserjet printer.

2. Expensive Cartridges

Believe it or not, you may have to buy a new printer rather than replace an ink cartridge. To understand why this is possible, you have first to understand the printing industry's business strategy regarding the manufacturers.

The printing industry operates a similar business model to the razor industry. The razor industry began this model of selling razor buyers cheap razors and handles at first-buy and then asking for more money to replace the razors.

Printer manufacturers do the same thing by selling printers alongside ink on the cheap at first. When you run out of ink and need to buy more, you are sold the ink cartridge at a costly price.

Instead of overpaying for ink cartridges, it would be best if you just went ahead to buy a new inexpensive printer that can cater to your current printing needs.

3. Slow Print Speed

Your printer gradually reduces in working speed as you put miles on it. It gets slower to get print jobs done because its inner parts start to become worn out. If you are a numbers person and need a metric to measure this, you can use the ppm unit.

PPM is short for pages per minute, and it is used to describe how many pages a printer can print every minute. A variation of ppm is ipm or images per minute.

If you would like to test your printer's speediness, you can use it to print in draft mode. This mode does not use a lot of ink, and it is swift to print in this mode. If printing in draft mode is taking time, it may be time to get a new one.

4. Poor Print Quality

When your printer keeps churning out print pages that are either hard to read or completely unclear, that is a warning sign you need to take seriously. A lack of ink or a problem with the ink cartridge could cause this, so you may want to ensure nothing wrong there before writing off your printer.

However, suppose the problem persists after changing the ink cartridge and ensuring that the cartridge you have is authentic. In that case, you may want to buy a new printer.

5. Outdated Technology

Printer manufacturers are relentless in their pursuit of making printers as robust as possible. Now and then, they put out a new printer model that can make your printing life more straightforward. If that is the case for you, then you might want to order a new printer and dispose of this old one safely.

It would be best if you did not cling onto your old printer when there is a new one out there that can make the workload more manageable.

Take, for example, how printers started incorporating wireless technology to make it possible for multiple people to print using one printer without being physically present with the device.

Lastly, printers are an attack vector for malicious actors. They can connect to your printer via the internet and attack other computers from there. Newer printers come with newer security measures that can help protect you against such attacks. It would help if you got a new model for this reason.

Conclusion 

You love your printer, and we get it, but sometimes you have to let go so that you can have something new to hold onto.