DCP-T530DW Experience Seamless Printing with Auto Duplex and WiFi Support Multi-function WiFi Color Ink Tank Printer(4 Ink Bottles Included)

The maker's exact model code. Printer families share marketing names across very different machines, and the cartridge that fits depends on this code, not the family name.

How the machine puts marks on paper, which drives almost everything else about it. Ink tank models refill from bottles and cost the least per page in India; laser is fastest for plain text and does not dry out when idle; cartridge inkjets are cheapest to buy and dearest to run.

Inkjet

Sprays liquid ink from replaceable cartridges. Cheap to buy, expensive per page, and the head can clog if unused for weeks.

Ink tank

Refillable reservoirs filled from bottles. Higher purchase cost, far lower cost per page.

Laser

Fuses toner powder with heat. Fast, sharp text, no drying out, but colour models are expensive.

LED

Works like laser with an LED array instead of a laser. Similar results, often a more compact body.

Thermal

Uses heat-sensitive paper or ribbon. Common for receipts and labels; plain thermal print fades over time.

Dot matrix

Strikes an inked ribbon through a pin head. Slow and noisy, but the only common way to print carbon-copy multi-part forms.

Dye-sublimation

Transfers dye with heat for continuous-tone photos. Used for dedicated photo printers.

Whether the machine prints in colour or black only. A monochrome laser is markedly cheaper to buy and to run when colour is never needed.

What the machine does besides print. An all-in-one saves desk space, but a failed print head takes the scanner out of service with it.

Whether the machine prints both sides on its own. Manual duplex only means it prompts you to flip the stack, which saves paper but no time.

Dots per inch, such as 1200 x 1200. Above roughly 600 dpi the difference is hard to see on plain text, and it matters mainly for photos and fine line art.

Whether the machine can print to the edge of the sheet without a white margin, which matters for photos.

Pages per minute in black, measured to the ISO test standard. It excludes the wait for the first page, so a short job feels slower than this number suggests.

Pages per minute in colour, to the same ISO standard. Inkjets typically drop much further from their black figure than lasers do.

How long from idle to the first printed sheet. Lasers must warm up; this is what you actually wait for when printing a single page, and it is often the more honest speed figure.

The maximum pages the machine can survive in a month, not a recommendation. Makers also publish a recommended monthly volume that is a fraction of this; running near the duty cycle shortens the machine's life.

The print volume the maker actually designed the machine for. This is the realistic figure to match against your own usage, unlike the duty cycle.

How many sheets the main tray holds. A 100-sheet tray needs refilling roughly every half ream, which becomes a chore in a busy office.

How many printed sheets stack before they need clearing. A small output tray can jam on long unattended jobs.

Whether the scanner can pull in a stack of pages by itself instead of one sheet at a time on the glass. Essential for scanning multi-page documents.

How many sheets the document feeder takes at once.

Whether the feeder can scan both sides without you turning the stack over. Single-pass models do it in one go; others run the stack through twice.

What the machine can print on besides plain paper, such as envelopes, labels, card or photo paper. Heavier media needs a straight paper path, which not every model has.

How the machine accepts jobs. Wi-Fi Direct lets a phone print without joining your network, which is a separate feature from ordinary Wi-Fi.

Whether scans can go straight to email, a shared folder or cloud storage rather than only to a directly connected computer.

The exact supply codes this machine takes. It is the single most useful fact in the category and almost never on the product listing: supply availability and cost decide the real cost of owning the printer.

How many pages one cartridge or bottle set prints, to the ISO standard at 5% coverage. Real documents with images use far more, so treat it as a comparison figure between models rather than a promise.

How many pages the supplies included in the box will print. Bundled starter cartridges are often a fraction of a full one, so the first replacement comes sooner than expected.

Whether each colour is its own cartridge. With a combined tri-colour unit, running out of one colour means replacing all three.

Whether the machine accepts refills or third-party supplies without a chip check. Chipped models can refuse cheaper alternatives or after-market refills entirely.

Width x depth x height in millimetres. Check the depth with the trays extended, which is often much more than the closed figure.

What the machine shows you. Without a screen, errors and ink levels are only visible from a connected computer or the phone app.

Electricity used while printing. Lasers draw far more than inkjets because they heat the fuser, which can matter on an inverter or a small UPS.

How loud the machine is while printing, in decibels. Worth checking for a printer that shares a room with a desk, since dot matrix and some lasers are markedly louder.

A link to the maker's own specification page for this exact model. It is the source a disputed fact here should be checked against, and it is where the supply codes are confirmed.

Which revision of the maker's spec page these facts were read from, as a date or version. Makers quietly edit spec pages after launch, so this records which wording was in front of us.