There are various type of printers you can find in the market.

Dot-matrix printers - This type of printers requires printer ribbon. It is used mainly for printing delivery orders, invoices, receipts when you need multiple copies of the same document. When you buy this printer, you have to decide between 80 column or 132 column printer models. 132 column is usually used to print reports. 132 column printers has been replaced by laser printers as the printing noise, speed and quality are far behind the laser printers. 80 column dot-matrix printers are also slowly replaced by inkjet printers.  
 
Inkjet Printers - This type of printers requires ink cartridge. Usually is used to print documents for temporary used as the inkjet printout is sensitive to water. You cannot use highlighter marker on inkjet printouts. The cost of this printer is low.

Laser Printers - This is the most popular printer you can find in business offices. Laser printer uses toner (black or colored powder) instead of liquid inks. In term of printing quality and speed, laser printer is the best among all. Laser printer is more expensive than inkjet printer but it servers the business printing needs well. You can choose laser printer with duplex printing function to save trouble to turn the paper if you need to print document on both sides of the paper. You can choose printer with network interface card for sharing printing on network.

Thermal Printers - This type of printers is using thermal printing technology to print on thermal paper. It is widely used by ATM receipt printing, cash register printing. Printing width is narrow and usually around 40 columns.

Bar Code Printers - It is specially designed for printing bar code labels. There are two ways barcode printers print barcode, the first method is Thermal Transfer and the second method is Direct Thermal. Direct Thermal prints the barcode directly on the label while Thermal Transfer make use of a ribbon and a print head. The ribbon is heated and the image is etched on by the print head on a pre-defined area. Thermal transfer allows you to print barcodes on a wider variety of materials than direct thermal.

One disadvantage of thermal transfer is that the ribbon needs to be changed quite frequently. If you are using the barcode printer in a manufacturing environment, there could be a lot of downtime. A direct thermal printer is faster and is useful particularly where speed is required and you are not printing a lot of barcodes all the time. An example would be in a hospital where each patient warded is given a barcode to identify them. A disadvantage of thermal direct printing is that direct thermal labels tend to fade over time (6 months to a year).