Print ’em At Home — A guide to buy a good home printer in India
Download the Viz.: Print ’em At Home ; Dataset: Google Sheet
The market of home printers has seen an exponential growth during 2020–2021 as work-from-home became a norm due to the pandemic. A report by 360 Research Report estimates that the revenue generated on home printers went up by 14.3% in 2021 (in India). The current market of home printers is worth $0.5 billion and is projected to gradually grow.
As more companies move towards remote work and more homes turn into home-offices, the need for having a printer in a home-setup would increase. This means, buyers must educate themselves of all the sellers available in the market, the types of printers & their technicalities, maintenance procedure & costs, price of refilling and printing cost per page, to state a few. A common Indian mentality is to dig deep into the nitti-gritties of value for money. Take cars for example… you know the rest, we know the research we Indian’s do before we buy a car.
This info-viz/ digital guided experience, would try to make the decision making of buying a new printer easy by jumping into the nitti-gritties of features & value for money.
Quick note: The data of the printers was gathered from Amazon.in during 2022, as it is the biggest and most common market place for Indians to buy electronics. This means the products are available and relevant.
Understanding Home Printers
Home printers are mainly of 3 types: Inkjet, Ink Tank & Laser Printer.
Inkjet: The cartridge is a small campsule that holds ink on a mechanical arm of the printer. The relatively low capacity of the cartridge leads to lower yields.
Ink Tank: The ink tank printers are a better version of the cartridge printers. They have a tank or an ink container which has a higher capacity and longer idle life.
Laser Printer: They comprises of a toner which holds ink in amorphour form. The powder is projected on the sheet and is passed through a curing light to settle the ink.
Players in the Market
The market is mostly dominated by 4 companies: HP, Canon, EPSON & Brother. HP amongst the 4 has a wide range of offerings and types of printers and markets its printers as home-first, followed by Canon, EPSON and Brother.
The chart below shows the number of printers the company sells at different price points. Each dot indicates a printer.
This graph will remain the base for the rest of the charts in the article. Insights from the above chart
- Inject printers are cheaper than ink tank printers and laser printers are the most expensive type of home printer.
What you need to know about a Printer?
Cost Per Print (CPP)
Arguably the most important feature people consider before buying a printer, after cost of the printer itself, is the cost per print.
It is closely related to the price of ink and quantity of ink available in the cartridge. Some printers are also optimised to utilize lesser ink.
Insights:
- The cheaper the printer — the costlier is the cost of each print
Number of Printer per Refill Cycle (a.k.a) Yield
Every printer has an ink reservoir. The amount of ink this reservoir holds and the efficiency with which the printer uses that ink determines the
number of sheets it can print on a whole. The number of pages a printer can print with a full tank is called its yield.
Insights:
- Ink tank printers, although on the expensive side of the home printers, have a greater yield than other types of printers.
- HP’s Ink tank printers seem to have a higher yield than its competitors.
Speed of printing or Printer per Minute (PPM)
Speed of printing is determined by the number of pages a printer can print with-in one minute. It is also known as Prints Per Minute (PPM). Every printer has a different PPM for colour and black and white prints. The standard measurement is the speed of printing a ‘draft’ colour or black and white page.
Insights:
- Laser printers have a greater PPM as most of the home based laser printers do not print in colour and the toner is long and efficient.
Summary — Spacial comparison of printer price,
speed of printing and cost of printing.
The desirable printers are the ones which have a low cost per print (CPP), high yield, high page per minute (PPM) and are relatively low in price. This is achieved by the printers mentioned in the 1st and 4th quadrant in the chart above.
Visualising
There are 5 parameters which have to be encoded into the representation: PPM, CPP, price of printer, type & brand of printer.
To make the representation visual and easy to comprehend by the audience, I took the approach of a glyph inspired by the falling drop metaphor. A glyph is a character of symbol which has its visual elements like size, colour, pattern, graphical elements, etc. encoded with data.
A printer is a machine that spreads ink on a physical medium like paper, it’s like dropping ink.
The size of the drop: The yield of the printer i.e. the number of pages it can print in one refill cycle.
The circles depicting motion of a drop: The speed at which the ink drops hit the paper i.e. Speed of printing (PPM).
The bars inside the drop: The cost of the drops which eventually land on the paper and add up to the printing price/paper i.e. cost per print (CPP)
Colour of the glyph: The type of printer it is.
Final Visualisation
Download the Viz.: Print ’em At Home ; Dataset: Google Sheet
We can clearly see that ink tank printers are the better than other printers. Some interesting insights that jump out of the viz.
Insights:
- Canon makes the most number of ink tank printers but all of them are slower in printing than the rest of the printers in the market.
- HP and Brother are the only companies that make ‘home’ laser printer, so if you fancy one, you know where to go. Side-note, I would suggest going for Brother because they are clearly winning with PPM, CPP and also have printers at lower price range.
- EPSON doesn’t do anything but ink tank printers! They are marked very competitively on price and just fall a little short on the yield category.
- Most of the printers from Brother tick of all the boxes, almost feel like they are the best choice, but don’t jump the gun — they are never available in the market and their ink bottles are more expensive and thats why their CPP is also sometimes high! Their ink tank printers are the only ones which have two bars in the drop ~ cost ₹0.5-₹1 per print which is a lot!
- HP clearly knows what its doing, it has a few printers in the lower mid range and a few in the higher mid range. They compromise on the speed with high yield and lower cost per print which is acceptable by the Indian market. They are the only ones who have a portfolio with all 3 types of printers, and thus covering more market too!
Author’s Note
For someone who loves printing, this was a really fun visualisation for me to work on! A few parameters like Wi-Fi capabilities and duplex printing have been neglected in this study. This viz. will help create a strong base for further exploration if you are ever interested.
