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Cabling up your printer to your PC no longer takes thick cables connected to the parallel port - most are now USB compliant, which means faster printing, as USB 2.0 can reach speeds of up to 480Mbps and parallel ports were limited to around 1Mbps, and easier installation, as USB plugs are literally "plug and play" with most operating systems. Instead of the single option of hooking a printer up to a computer, and then printing files, you can now integrate your printer into your LAN and share that printer so that any computer in your home can print using only that one printer. Most OSs have not too recently added this ability, usually called "file and printer sharing" within your home network, allowing the other PCs in your home to print to that printer if the PC attached to it is up and running. Taking that one step further, printers are now coming out with direct networking capabilities - they can be connected to your home network like any other computer, and with only a little bit of communication which is often automated, you can print from any PC to these printers regardless of whether any other PC is on or not. All you need is an Ethernet port anywhere in your house to get this working, and software for each computer that helps it "find" the printer on the network to then be set up and ready to print. It is possible to share your printer over the Internet, since it is another IP address within your network, but it's really not a good idea - the overhead for a print job would slow down your connection, not to mention open up a few too many security holes in your router. As far as the kinds of printers go, you should consider what the primary purpose will be: do you really need to print text documents, like resumes, reports or essays, or graphics and pictures? Do you rarely need anything in color and can live with black and white, or do you plan on becoming an amateur photographer and printing out your best photos to show around the house? If good quality is acceptable, a bubble jet printer is probably right for you, but if you rely on the quality of the papers you produce, you may want to look at a laser printer instead. Laser printers are the cream of the crop for crisp, professional quality black and white text jobs, and their price has come down enough that they are becoming very affordable for home users. A high intensity laser marks the surface of the paper to attract the printer toner to shape the letters and graphics on the page and then fuses the toner to the paper's surface, and the professional quality and accuracy is clearly visible when compared to lesser printers. Color laser printers produce excellent color images, but the cost is almost as large as the size of the printers. Bubble jet printers are a step down from laser printers, and the most common of the inkjet style of printer, but offer the versatility of adding color into the mix. Whether you go with a black and white model or a color one, they both work the same, by generating heat to send miniscule droplets of ink onto the sheet of paper, and although you can smudge the results if you don't wait a moment for the ink to dry, they can produce very good results, especially when considering the cost of the printer. Older printers are often of dot-matrix origin, where a printer head with a matrix of pins would stamp against the paper for each character to transfer a small amount of ink. Needless to say, they were slow, noisy and produced low quality print jobs, but they were the only house on the block for years and are now rarely seen outside of technology museums.
Finally, consider multi-function printers, where you can get the same quality of printing, but also add in the ability to scan files into your computer, make photocopies for your records, or fax out signed documents. The cost will be higher, and the quality of output tends to slip a bit when you add on extra functions, as manufacturers think you may not notice, however, the versatility is worth it as long as you keep your eyes open to the output resolution and other factors. They take up the same footprint, or desk space as a conventional printer, but if you only scan in a document or two a month, it may well be worth it for the convenience of scanning and copying at home.
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