In todays market, there are basically 4 types of popular printers.

Inkjet
Laser
Thermal Transfer(Dye Sublimation)
Dot Matrix (Yes, theyre still selling these!)

The factors that separate them are simple.

Initial cost
Operation cost
Speed and Performance
Durability
Specialty jobs

If you are going to be printing strictly in Black & White (B&W), youre going to be happiest with a laser printer. They offer faster print speed, crisper text, and lower cost of operation. A good one is usually more expensive than an Inkjet, but with the costs of ink cartridges, youll soon recoup that initial investment.

A typical B&W laser printer for home-office type use will run $300-$500 and will give you 20-24 pages per minute(ppm). For big office printing, expect over $1,000. Also expect 30+ppm. You will also achieve a resolution of 1200 x 1200. Higher resolution means crisper text. Laser printers are also usually rated on monthly volume. This is something to consider if you are purchasing a printer that will get a lot of usage. Dont buy one rated for 10,000 pages a month if you know youll be printing 20,000. Youll wear it out quick.

You can also get color laser printers, their cost has come down a lot from the $5,000 units 10 years ago. Theyre usually fine for business type graphics, but I still like a nice photo inkjet for printing photos.

Inkjets and Thermal printers have much smaller cartridges and usually run out quicker than the toner in a laser. Because of that, the cost of printing each page can be much more. These printers can also be purchased with the ability to print onto CD/DVD, which is a nice feature. Duty cycle isnt as high as a laser, but for home/office printing, most of them can keep up fine. Their B&W text is generally suitable for business, though some of the photo printers have slightly jagged text. Again, theyre less expensive to purchase, but can cost 4 times as much to operate as a laser. If you dont do a lot of printing (<100 pages a month), dont be concerned with this aspect. If youre going to be printing photos though, cost-per-page is something to concider.

As it has been for the past several years, dot matrix printers are strictly for invoicing and multi-part forms. They are noisy, due to the fact that they are an impact printer. Pins are actually hitting the paper and this gives them the ability to print on multi-part forms. Some of the more expensive ones are extremely fast and are used to generate long reports. There really isnt much use for them other than that.

John Gibb manages http://www.computer-and-printer-reviews.com The site dedicated to computers and printers.