1. How many pages, honestly?
Take your annual page count and divide by twelve. That's your real monthly volume. Now find the printer's "recommended monthly volume" — not the "maximum duty cycle". If your monthly number is at or above that recommended figure, the printer is too small. Most early printer failures we see are simply machines run at the top of their spec for two years.
2. What's the true cost per page?
The cheapest printer is rarely the cheapest fleet. Toner yields and prices vary by an order of magnitude. Get the manufacturer's stated yield, divide the toner price by the yield, and you have a per-page number that's worth comparing. Add a small allowance for drum and maintenance kits. Now compare.
A €120 printer with €70 toner cartridges that yield 800 pages is not cheap. It is the most expensive printer you will ever buy.
3. Paper handling: more than you think
If your business prints anything other than plain A4 — envelopes, labels, multi-part forms, banking documents — paper handling is where most printers fail in the first quarter. Check tray capacity, bypass tray support, duplex weight range and ADF reliability. For passbooks and cheques, you're often looking at specialised dot-matrix or banking printers, not general-purpose laser.
Quick rule of thumb
- Desk & small team: a sensible A4 mono or colour laser. 30 ppm is plenty.
- Department of 20+: A4 multifunction with bigger tray and duplex.
- Mailroom / production: A3 multifunction or production-class copier.
- Bank counters: dot-matrix or specialised passbook printer.
4. Who's going to support it?
The single biggest predictor of whether a printer makes it past year three isn't the brand — it's whether someone with parts and training picks up the phone when it stops printing. Pick a vendor with engineers in your country, parts on shelves, and an SLA in writing. That's worth far more than the next 5 ppm of speed.
5. Connectivity and the next five years
Will you need pull-printing, secure release, mobile printing or scan-to-cloud in the next few years? It's much cheaper to buy a printer that supports those things now (most modern ones do) than to replace early because you didn't.
What we usually recommend
For most small-to-medium offices in Lebanon and the region, an Olivetti or Pantum mono laser at the desk and a small fleet of D-Copia or D-Color multifunction copiers for the team gives the best balance of cost-per-page, paper handling and serviceability. For banking and counter use, Olivetti PR2+ and Compuprint dot-matrix models remain the workhorses they have been for years.
If you'd like a no-obligation fleet review — we'll come on site, count what you have and propose what makes sense — get in touch.