This guide gives you the essentials to make the right decision. Because there is no such thing as a printer that can do it all, you must consider your printing needs: Do you print mostly text, graphics, or photos? Do you print in monochrome or color? Do you produce individual sheets or multipart forms? It helps to have some idea of what you'll get at a given price level. But most of all, you should understand at least a little about the strengths and weaknesses of the technologies available.

The number of ways that printer manufacturers have found to put ink on paper is nothing short of amazing. In the early days of PCs, printers produced only black-and-white (monochrome) output. Designs varied, but virtually all printers followed the typewriter-like practice of using something solid to slam a ribbon against a piece of paper, transferring ink to paper.

The best known of these impact designs is the dot matrix printer, which uses a matrix of pins to create ragged text characters and equally ragged graphics from dots. The dots are so large and so clearly separated from each other that in some cases it looks as though you can pick them up individually with tweezers.

The search for faster, quieter, and higher-quality printers has led to models that melt wax, heat dye, spit ink, and shine lasers. Like dot matrix printers, such models use dots to create images on paper. The dots are of a much finer grain, however, with resolutions measured in hundreds or even thousands of dots per linear inch (so small, in fact, that you can't see individual dots without a magnifying glass).

Thanks to higher resolutions, today's printers can reproduce the fonts we're all accustomed to seeing on our computer screens. They offer crisp text output that rivals professional printing, and they can print striking color graphics, presentations, and photographs. Resolution is high enough to make even the finest print in a contract easy to read, and photographs printed on the right paper are indistinguishable from prints created with film.

Before you buy a printer, read on.