12 Tips To Save Money On Printing

Printing costs can be a major business or home office expense. Ink and toner cartridges are for printers are expensive. New printers are so cheap now because the manufacture’s make their profit on the refill cartridges. You can save money by printing efficiently, saving money on refills and using settings and fonts that automatically save ink. Paper is not as expensive as ink but it’s good for your wallet and for the environment to use less.

So to reduce the cost of printing in your home or office, start using this twelve tips.

1. Print on Both Sides – To cut your paper costs in half, print on both sides of the paper. You printer may be able to do this automatically or you can simply flip the paper over.

2. Reuse Paper – If you have documents you no longer need and you want to print things just for your records or to review then use the backside of the documents for printing.

3. Print Just What You Need – Another way to save on paper is to only print what you absolutely need. One way to do this is to highlight the part of the document you want to print and press “Ctrl” and “p” at the same time. You may need to choose the “selection” option when the printer window opens.

4. Use Print What You Like To Print Web Pages – If you are printing out pages from a website try Print What You Like. This online editor allows you to open up a page from a website and remove the items you don’t want to print out including images, backgrounds and spaces.

5. Proof Read Text Before Printing – Before you print anything out use the grammar and spelling checker in your software. Also take a look at the spacing, margins and graphics. You can save a lot of ink if you don’t have to reprint pages due to errors.

6. Use Preview Mode To Check Printouts – If you need only a few pages of the document you are printing then you can see what the printout will look like in the print preview mode, allowing you to choose only the pages you want to print and see what the printout will look like.

7. Change Your Print Mode – Choosing the right print mode can also save ink. The print modes are normal, draft, and best quality. If you are printing something for your own use or just to review before the final printing then use the draft mode. It will be lighter and less clear than a higher resolution mode but it saves ink. The best quality mode is usually only needed for marketing materials, presentations, or documents with photos or graphics.

8. Print In Black and White – You can also choose black and white printing over full colour for many pages that you need to print. Black ink is less expensive and so it saves money.

9. Clean Your Printer’s Heads – One way that ink is wasted is by cleaning the printer heads. If you turn your printer off by unplugging it from the wall or turning off a power strip then the printer doesn’t have the chance to reset. When you turn it on it may go through a cleaning mode by default. If you do this on a regular basis a tremendous amount of ink is wasted. Instead turn the printer off by pressing the power button. If you print something at least once a week you can usually adjust any automatic print head cleaning in the printer software.

10. Buy Compatible Ink Cartridges – When you buy ink refills the most expensive method is to buy the genuine printer brand at a retail store one at a time. If you have to buy retail buy the combination packs or try the store brand instead. The best way to buy ink is to buy it online. You can also refill your cartridges manually. While this can be a messy process, you save a lot of money and still produce good quality prints.

11. Change Your Font – Ecofont is specifically designed to be less dense so it saves ink. Each letter has hard-to-notice holes in it so it takes less ink to print out your documents.

12. Print Until All Of The Ink Is Used In The Cartridge – Although you might get a warming message that the cartridge or toner is low you should be able to bypass it and print until the colour is no longer printing on the paper.

This guest post was written by James Adams from Cartridge Save, a leading specialist in printer consumables and printer ink supplies for UK-based businesses.