Did you know you can save a lot of money on ink? It’s no secret that printer ink costs can be a drain on the wallet. In fact, the cost of ink cartridges and toners can add up to be considerably more than the price of the printer itself.
That being said, printing documents is still an important part of every busy household or office. To prevent your printing costs from being sky high, you can first and foremost, choose a printer with lower ink or toner costs. However, there are a few more tricks that you can make use of to save ink.
We’ll share our 5 top tips below on how to be more economical and make your ink last longer below.
When printing documents that do not require a specific style of font, you can choose a more durable font. Some fonts require less ink than others. For example, the Century Gothic font or Times New Roman uses about 25% less ink than the commonly used Arial.
Another example of a font that will use less ink is Ecofont. This font contains minuscule holes that are invisible to the naked eye. This way you save ink with no noticeable difference!
Another way to save on ink is to choose a lower DPI or dots per inch number. This measures the resolution of the print. The higher the DPI, the better the quality of your prints. However, that also means that you use more ink and therefore the printing costs are higher. When printing in plain black text, a DPI of 300 to 600 is sufficient. You can change the DPI setting on your printer. This way you’re not wasting ink unnecessarily.
One way to keep ink costs down is to print in black and white. Colour cartridges are generally more expensive than black cartridges. Therefore, if it’s not completely necessary to print in colour, it’s cost-efficient to print the pages in black and white. This will work for internal business documents or household admin.
How can you change your printer settings to print in black and white only? In the settings, choose "only use black ink". When you choose “greyscale print”, the printer often combines the different colours of ink to produce a higher quality black.
It’s not just the ink cartridges themselves that can run up your printing costs. Paper can be expensive too. With the duplex feature, you can print on both sides of the paper. By printing your documents on both sides, you use half the paper.
We also recommend buying your printer paper in bulk. Paper multipacks or reams of paper cost less than buying one pack of printer paper alone. You can also consider using a lower paper weight for less important prints and save the higher quality paper for more professional uses.
We hope these tips will help you save money when it comes to printing those important documents.
If you’re still deciding which printer to choose, you can reference our inkjet and laser printer comparison guide to help you in your decision.
