The ink jet printers function differently, by spraying ink on the paper and they need to be recharged when the ink is exhausted. There are some low-priced ink jet printers that are intended for home use, but they print only a few copies a month and the ink replacement is quite expensive.

When buying a colour laser you must decide the intent for the device. Will you need a small amount of colour printouts? Or will you rather need more copies? If you need to print banners and documents of bigger size, you will probably need a quality colour laser.

The memory of a printer is important, as it is responsible for the speed of the printing. For black and white texts, the memory is not essential, but for quality printed images the memory should have at least 128 MB of RAM. Also check if the memory can be upgraded.

Then you should consider the speed of the printer. This speed is measured in pages per minute, but this feature is not highly important when deciding on the laser colour you want to buy. Look out because the speed that is written on the user's manual is not entirely realistic, and may not correspond, so you should think that it is a bit lower than the manufacturers say.

Next, consider the volume the colour laser printer can take. Find out the monthly figures the printer can handle, and compare it to your approximate volume of printed material. It is best if you buy a printer that can print by 25% more that your estimated number of pages per month.

The resolution is an important feature of the colour laser printer. The higher the resolution, the better the quality of the printed page. This feature is relevant in case you want to print out photos or images. For text printing you should choose a printer with at least 600x600 dpi, while for images a minimum of 1200 dpi is recommended.

The colour lasers print on practically any type of paper. However, the quality and the aspect of the printed page differ according to the level of absorption of each paper in part. You should test a few types of paper and decide on the one that suits your colour laser best.

Some people don't find it essential to print in colour. People usually want a printed page for its contents and rarely for the colour of it. However, when you need to print out a photo or an image it is very important that you have a colour laser printer that will render the image as it should be. A colour laser printer is recommended for departments such as graphic design or marketing.