Even seconds after turning them on, the unusual sounds and lights your business printers make can let you know they aren’t going to be much use today. Paper jams abound. Weird blinking lights tell you that you need a technician to fix a problem. The simple truth is that your printers aren’t up to the task anymore and you need to replace them.
How?
That’s what we’re going to explain here.
What to Examine When Searching for New Business Printers
Knowing your way around business printers is the only way to find the right solution for your business. That’s where these four tips – all designed to help you find the right printers – come into play.
Tip 1 – Start With the Upfront Cost
Cost is a tricky beast when it comes to business printers. On one hand, you have a budget to meet, and spending every spare dollar on a printer isn’t in your equation. On the other, you also don’t want to underspend and end up with a printer that has a short lifespan or costs you more in the long run – through toner and maintenance issues – than a more expensive upfront printer.
More trickiness emerges when you start researching prices. Search around for the average cost of a printer and you might run across Statista’s figures claiming that you should spend around $95.92 per printer in 2025. That figure doesn’t match the reality of business printers – it seems to account solely for the home consumer market – so expect to pay several thousand dollars for a printer suitable for your company’s needs.
Tip 2 – Evaluate Your Printing Needs
You have your budget secured. Next up – figuring out what your company actually needs from its business printers versus the litany of features on offer. Your goal here is to avoid the trap of buying printers that seem to do everything when you only need a handful of features. The inverse also applies because you don’t want a basic printer when you need multiple functions.
Think about these three factors when creating a shortlist:
- Volume – How many pages do you need to print per month? It might be more than you think – companies printed 8 trillion pages back in 2020. Those figures have declined by about 5% up to 2025, but you still have to think about capacity versus your needs when choosing your printer.
- Frequency – Related to volume is frequency. Will you use your printer a little bit every day? Leave it unused for several days at a time then put it through the ringer during isolated busy days? Leave it on and have it whirring away constantly? The answers matter because they determine whether you opt for printers that require minimal maintenance (and are more expensive) or risk it with a slightly cheaper option.
- Document Type – We can also call this print type in the sense that you’re mostly determining if you’ll print primarily in black and white or need a strong color printer. The latter would be useful when creating materials for presentations. However, if you’re just printing off letters, contracts, and the like, a more cost-effective black-and-white printer is often a better choice.
Tip 3 – Consider Workflow Management
The ongoing costs of running business printers often go underestimated – or even unaccounted for – in companies. But they can add up. Between employees printing when they don’t need to and errors caused by the printers themselves, waste adds up and all of it costs you. Dollars need to go toward more paper and toner because you don’t have a grip on how your printers are being used. That’s before we get into the issue of privacy. Companies that work with sensitive and private data (think hospitals and clinics) often run into issues of people printing and then leaving documents in the outgoing tray for all to see.
You can’t risk those sorts of breaches in your business.
And even if data breaches aren’t a factor, you’ll still want to keep your ongoing costs down.
In both cases, printers that have workflow and document management systems are a better choice than bare-bones printers that just do the most basic jobs. Management systems allow you to do things like monitor printer usage and queue documents so they only print when the person who’s supposed to see them is at the machine.
Tip 4 – Remember Ongoing and Long-Term Costs
In a perfect world, you’d get your business printers and not have to think about anything else once they’re installed. But we’re not in a perfect world – printing costs are a regular expense. There are the waste issues we’ve already mentioned. Add to them toner and paper expenses (both ongoing costs) and the maintenance needed to keep your business printers operational.
The latter can be a particular burden. Yelp tells us that the average cost of repairing a printer is $80, including parts and labor. There’s also the time factor to consider – printers that need maintenance go out of commission for however long it takes to schedule and wait for a repair and that repair can take a couple of hours.
Why does this matter in the context of you choosing business printers?
We touched on it earlier. Cheaper upfront doesn’t always mean you’ve gotten a good deal. Less expensive printers are often more prone to maintenance issues that will cost you enormously in the future. Add paper and toner to that equation – cheaper printers often require more regular ink refills – and you get a blow to your budget.
The upfront cost isn’t the only one to consider. Cheaper printers could really burn your business bank balance in the long run.
Make Finding the Right Printers Simple
You could spend days bouncing around different printers trying to find the right choice. Or you could make life simple for your business and work by letting Copiers Northwest help you locate the perfect business printers. Best-in-class print technology is our stock in trade and we cover a huge range of locations, including Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, Bend, Eugene, Salem, Yakima, Portland, Olympia, and the Tri-Cities. Get in touch with Copiers Northwest today – new ideas and new solutions await your business.