If you’ve had your printer for a long time, you may feel attached and sentimental in wanting to keep it. However, eventually you’ll need to ask yourself whether it’s worth keeping your old inkjet or laser printer. Printers these days are low priced because manufacturers make their real money by selling the ink cartridges, which means economics may weigh in and you’d end up paying more to repair your current print VS replacing it with a new one. Sure, you’ve grown accustomed to using your old one, but keeping that printer alive may cost you more money than it’s worth and the quality of your printing may be diminished. This brings up the question, is your printer still serving your needs?

End users who aren’t particularly tech-savvy may need help assessing whether it’s worth keeping that old printer going or not. Here are three tips on determining whether it’s time to replace your printer or not:

The printer is no longer meeting your needs.

The primary purpose of a printer is to print. If your printer is no longer capable of meeting your needs or demand, it’s time to start looking for one that can keep up with your tasks. The most obvious signs it’s time to replace it are:

1. No longer provides you with the necessary print speed.
2. It cannot hold enough paper for the type of jobs you are printing.
3. It’s starting to jam and make new unordinary noises when operating.

In addition to noticing the inability to keep up with your tasks you may also notice your ink cartridges aren’t lasting and the quality of the print has diminished. In addition, the pantone colors start to change, and ink bleed is apparent.

Perhaps the most obvious indication that you need to replace your printer is when you see signs that it’s malfunctioning. Like other devices with moving parts, printers have rollers and gears that after years of use become warn and as a result cause noises to come from operation.

You’re getting an unsatisfactory performance.

If you’re constantly fighting the urge to throw your printer in the trash, it may be time for an upgrade. Any electronic device can inherit defects and may run slowly or perform poorly from time to time. However, if it’s becoming a daily struggle, it’s time to scrap your old printer and get a fresh start.

1. Slow print speeds may be the result of simply having an older, slower printer make and model, or it could be that your printers’ internal parts are failing. Either way, your time is valuable, and it may not be worth the trouble to keep using a slower unproductive printer.
2. Print blemishes are often caused by having a defective ink/toner cartridge and print head, but if you’ve changed the cartridge and you’re still not getting good print results, it’s probably imminent that your printer is failing. Look for lines, bars, and marks that don’t improve after changing the cartridge and cleaning the printer. Try printing a test print page, or in some cases it’s referred to as an alignment page and see if the lines are straight. If not, it’s time to replace.

The technology is outdated/obsolete.

You update your computer, laptop, and smartphone every few years to keep up with new technology, so why wouldn’t you consider doing the same for your printer? Print technology continues to progress rapidly, with newer makes and models from recent years outperforming older models. Their print speeds and pages per minute (ppm) for inkjet printers continue to get faster and home printers have become near business class in quality. The newest models (Multi-Function-Printer MFP) also offer advanced capabilities like scanning, automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, and much more.

The other big downside to continuing to use an older printer is that it can be difficult and expensive to replace old parts. Printer technology continues to change so rapidly that even printer models from a few years ago may require an extra effort to find replacement components. If your printer is more than five years old, the sign is on the wall that it needs to be replaced. The longer you wait the more you may become frustrated.

1. Older printers are harder to repair because parts become increasingly rare with time. You will also have to pay for labor costs no matter how easy or hard it is to find replacement parts, so you may find that it would cost more to repair your seven-year-old printer than it would cost to just buy a new printer.
2. As printers evolve over time, many older ink and toner cartridge models become obsolete. You can find older cartridge models for many different printer models through trusted retailers like 1ink.com, but even sites like ours end up phasing out old cartridges once our distributors stop manufacturing them.

You may be tempted to hold onto your old printer, but you can get much better print quality and delivery from a newer model. Just think about how much better your documents and images will look and how much time you could save by not having to fiddle with your device. No matter what printer you use, Authorityit.com can help educate you on the best fit printer for your needs. Whether you are an individual or business we can find one that is right for you and within your budget! If you find our articles useful, please support us by liking them and our page.