Peripherals
Well three really; most of us for everyday home or small office use will go for a colour inkjet printer. They are cheap to buy (from around only €60) and produce great results. Slightly more expensive ones will produce excellent photo prints as well. The drawback is the ink. Or rather the cost of it. It actually costs more per gram than platinum. So check out the running costs in the small print or the reviews of any printer you’re interested in carefully.
Then there are laser printers. If you want to print in just black and white and do quite a lot of printing, then you can get a superb laser printer for about €120 which is MUCH cheaper to run. They use toner cartridges which are far cheaper than ink.
Colour lasers are now more affordable at around €350 up, but these cheaper ones though fine for graphics, will struggle to produce photos of the same quality as a much cheaper inkjet.
And then there is a fourth choice.
An MFP. Or Multi Function Peripheral.
That’s a Printer, Scanner, and Copier in one to you and me. Some have a Fax machine incorporated as well.
As you may expect, there’s usually a compromise made in these useful machines – they tend to be biased either to be good at printing photographs, and not quite so good at day to day office tasks of scanning and copying, or great for the office tasks but a bit naff at producing good photos.
The other drawback is that if they go wrong, you lose the lot; printer, scanner and copier, so bear this in mind.
Scanners
There are four basic types of scanner.
1) Flatbed scanners.
These are what you would normally picture in your mind when you think of a scanner – they have a glass plate like a photocopier on which you place the document or picture to be scanned, a lid which you lower, and voila, the machine scans and you have a copy.
I bought one of these for €70 and it does fine.
2) Sheetfeed Scanners.
These differ from flatbed scanners in that you feed the sheets into the machine and they move through it. Great if you have lots of documents to copy on a regular basis.
3) Handheld Scanners
These portable small machines rely on you manually sweeping over the document, often several times. Great if you have the steady hands of a neuro-surgeon, and the patience of a Spurs fan waiting to win something.
Photo scanners
These scanners are optimised to scan slides, transparencies and film negatives – a specialist market, although many flatbed scanners will now do this job as well.
As usual, the jargon relating to scanners makes understanding Greek seem easy, but for the vast majority of us if you buy a scanner suited to your needs by one of the well-known manufacturers, Canon, HP, Epson etc. you won’t go far wrong.
A decent scanner will come with the relevant software to process your documents, some with OCR (Optical Character Reader) software so that you can edit your document with a word processing program.
CD/DVD Drives
Whether you buy a Laptop of Desktop, you will need at least one CD/DVD drive. There is no point in having anything but a DVD Burner these days and it should be able to read and write all formats, DVD-R, DVD-W, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW. Newer drives also support Dual Layer (DL) DVD’s, which hold twice as much data – the DL DVDs themselves are prohibitively expensive at the moment, but will come down in price soon, and there is little saving in buying a burner that doesn’t support them.
A perfectly good DVD burner will set you back about €40.
All these drives will read and write CDs as well.
If you want to do a lot of copying CDs or DVDs you may wish to invest in a second drive.
If you want a second drive for a Laptop then you can buy an external drive that plugs into a USB port.
Hard Disks
Your computer will have at least one hard disk to store your programs and data. The size of hard disks is measured in Gigabytes (GB). A laptop will typically have a hard disk of between 80GB and 160GB, whereas a budget Desktop should have a minimum of 320GB and a high end machine at least 500GB.
You can easily add more hard disks to your Desktop, to increase your storgae space if need be, and you can add an external drive to your Laptop. External drives are more expensive than internal ones.
There are two basic types of disk drives you will see advertised – EIDE or PATA drives which are the older type but still commonly found on less expensive machines, and SATA or the latest SATA2 drives, newer and in theory at least faster.
Again, for most users it doesn’t matter which you have; for those people looking for top performance, SATA2 drives are the ones to choose.
A 250GB drive will cost you around €90.
