Saving Money on your Printing Costs April 13, 2010 15:09 by Matt Bird
Fact: Ink is now more expensive than gold....
....and I don't know about you but my gold reserves are not up to printing my latest memoirs. So I thought to myself, I do like gold an awful lot, so why not share my knowledge of minimising costs, let you pick and choose which of these 11 valuable nuggets you will implement, and my lawyer will be in touch for my 10% cut of your savings :-)
1: Separate cartridge slots
Own a printer that employs tri-colour cartridges? Well stop! Purchase one with individual cartridge slots for each colour, and reap the rewards of minimising your waste. No more replacing your red and yellow after all those photo prints of the lucious blue sky. With ink and toner now containing chemicals to stave off any drying out effect, you can let those colours sit for a long time with no risk.
2: Draft print mode
Using up to 50% less ink than normal print modes, you can save a huge amount of money at a small sacrifice to quality. Avoid using this for any official documents or image printing you are doing, but for run-of-the-mill printing it is a great little money saver.
3: Greyscale printing
Needless colour in your kids homework graphs or bright family letterheads? If you can live without the colour, select greyscale in your printing options. This will predominantly use your black cartridge, saving the more expensive colour cartridges for your important pages. Note some printers will still use a small amount of colour to create the grey shading, but it is significantly less than what would be used otherwise.
4: Duplexing
Gone are the days of manually feeding pages back into the printer to get text on both sides, duplexers now do it for you and better yet - are available in a huge range of printers, even some budget ones! Saving time and effort, it is well worth selecting this optin in printer settings and halving your paper costs.
5: The Paper You Use
WIth advancements in printer technology giving more reliable performance and better components, printers are now happy being fed lighter paper. When printing any documents not requiring a professional finish why not throw in some 75 or 80gsm paper, available in typical office retailing stores, giving good prints whilst saving you money.
6: Printing with Low Ink levels
Colour cartridges are more expensive, that is a given. What many users do not realise is when your black ink level runs low, some printers will begin to mix all three colours to make black to finish the print job. If your printer guide highlights this function, you must keep a close eye on your black ink levels, otherwise you will printing away your colour (and thus gold!) at a sickening rate.
7: Limit how many times you print
Now now, I do not mean stop printing. This is just to highlight, why send a print request of 5 copies of something at 10am, then come back to print 6 copies of something else at 10:15am. Laser printers must warm up and Inkjet printers lubricate their print heads each and every time they start a new print job. If you send prints together, it minimises the amount they have to do this - saving ink, power and money!
8: Limit how many times you turn on/off
Certain inkjet printers perform print head cleaning every time they turn on - using a fair amount of ink. If this delightful 'perk' is listed in your user manual, ensure you either limit how often the printer is turned off, or only turn it on when you have a reasonable amount of printing to do.
9: Paper Settings in Printer Options
A well hidden trick-of-the-trade, the paper settings can sway your ink usage hugely. Different papers have varying absorption levels and ink dispersion rates, which are pre-programmed into the printers. Go through the printer options (print - properties - paper type), and confirm it matches the paper you are printing onto.
10: Recycle Paper
Only printed a couple of lines on a page? One side of the sheet completely clean? Put it back in your paper tray and watch your printing costs fall. Environmentally friendly, ideal for use in tandem with point 2 - draft printing!
Use our quality tested Compatibles
I dislike sales plugs, pitches, all things appearing out of place.... but this really is a great way to save money, if you can guarantee a supplier of quality tested cartridges with a product guarantee (just incase an issue is experienced), you can save an astounding amount of money. Here at StinkyInk we do not list cartridges we are not comfortable putting our name to, and provide some brilliant options site-wide. Take a quick look at our compatible Dell 1320 Toners, which performed better than the original cartridges in our independent performance and user testing, (so well I made my Dad buy one for work!).
Anymore tips you think should be added? Any mind blowing ways of keeping £££'s in your pocket and ink in your cartridges? Comment and let us know, all good points will be added to the post and acknowledged :-) Happy Printing!
2 Responses to “Saving Money on your Printing Costs”
April 14, 2010 02:47
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Wealthy Writer, Stinky Ink. Stinky Ink said: New Article, Saving Money on your Printing Costs (http://bit.ly/dAxALe) [...]
April 14, 2010 15:01
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by ashley smith, jessica green, SavingMoney64, Wealthy Writer, Stinky Ink and others. Stinky Ink said: New Article, Saving Money on your Printing Costs (http://bit.ly/dAxALe) [...]