The short version
- Inkjet: cheap to buy, costly per page, slow on long jobs. Best for occasional photo or home printing.
- Laser printer: prints only, fast and sharp text, lower cost per page than inkjet. Good for a small team.
- Laser MFP (multifunction copier): prints, copies, scans and often faxes. Built for shared, all-day office use.
Cost per page matters more than the purchase price
Inkjet cartridges hold little ink, so the cost of each page is high even when the printer itself is cheap. Laser toner lasts far longer. For example, a black toner cartridge for the Sindoh D7500 Series is rated for up to 47,700 pages. Over a year of office printing, the running cost usually outweighs the price tag. Read why cheap printers become expensive.
Speed and volume
Office machines are rated in pages per minute (ppm) and recommended monthly volume. The Sindoh D5000 Series prints 25 or 35 ppm and is recommended for 4,000 to 20,000 pages a month; the D7500 Series prints 45 or 55 ppm for 7,000 to 50,000 pages. A desktop inkjet is not designed for that kind of load. See how fast a copier you need.
Scanning and copying
If staff scan invoices, contracts or forms, a printer alone is not enough. An MFP with a document feeder scans stacks of pages to email or a shared folder in one go. The D7500 and D5000 Series use a single-pass duplex feeder that scans both sides at once. Learn what a dual-scan feeder does.
Which to choose
- A few hundred pages a month, mostly printing: a laser printer.
- A shared office that prints, copies and scans: an A3 or A4 laser MFP.
- Colour brochures, A3 drawings or high volume: an A3 colour MFP such as the D7500 or D5000 Series.
Not sure? Ask us for a recommendation and tell us roughly how much you print.