To choose the right printer, you have to think honestly about what you'll print and how frequently you'll print it. The type of printing determines the quality you need. How often you print dictates how fast the printer must be and how much you're prepared to spend on each job.

If you print a lot of text, such as letters and other business documents, a laser printer is likely your best bet. They're fast and produce good-looking documents at only a few cents per page.

For office documents containing color charts and other graphics, consider a color laser printer. Color laser prices have dropped so much in recent years as to become affordable for even the smallest office. They often produce black-and-white pages at a cost per page similar to monochrome lasers. And they print color photos that are adequate for plain-paper documents that mix text and pictures, such as newsletters and marketing brochures.
You'll get top photo quality from an inkjet printer. The choice becomes more complicated if you print a mix of photos and text documents. If you're a home user who prints digital camera photos, text documents for your own use (such as driving directions or product recommendations from a Web site), and maybe a few letters a month, an inkjet printer offers a good compromise between quality and speed and asks for less maintenance and printer support. You'll need a variety of papers, and you'll have to learn your way around the printer's driver settings. You can reduce how often you swap paper types by purchasing a model with two separate paper trays.

In the past, almost all inkjets offered the same features: one paper tray for 100 or 150 sheets and ten envelopes, minimal buffer memory, and no networking option. These days, however, vendors are increasingly adding a variety of features--such as larger displays or touch screens, Bluetooth wireless or Wi-Fi, and increased paper management options--to differentiate their products. Makers of business-oriented inkjets are also offering higher capacities, optional paper trays, ethernet network connectivity, and more memory.
Laser printers generally have more features and options than inkjets do. Monochrome lasers hold from 150 to 900 sheets, with corporate models frequently holding around 500 sheets as standard; color lasers hold from about 200 to 1250 sheets. You can also add trays that hold as much as 5000 sheets.

Most high-end lasers include at least 64MB of RAM, with expansion options permitting a few hundred megabytes of memory for queuing multiple print jobs at once (for a busy office, equip your laser with at least 64MB to 128MB of memory); some offer optional hard drives that you can use to save complex forms and other preprocessed images or to store passwords for confidential print jobs, and they all have standard or optional ethernet adapters. Some more-recent lasers also have features such as the ability to print directly from a USB flash drive.