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Consumer and some commercial printers are designed for low-volume, short-turnaround print jobs ; requiring virtually no setup time to achieve a hard copy of a given document.

However, printers are generally slow devices ( 30 pages per minute is considered fast, and many inexpensive consumer printers are far slower than that ), and the cost per page is actually relatively high.

However, this is offset by the on-demand convenience and project management costs being more controllable compared to an out-sourced solution.

The printing press remains the machine of choice for high-volume, professional publishing.

However, as printers have improved in quality and performance, many jobs which used to be done by professional print shops are now done by users on local printers ; see desktop publishing.

Local printers are also increasingly taking over the process of photofinishing as digital photo printers become commonplace.