A printer is one of the most important computer accessories and should be chosen carefully. Not only should you take into consideration the actual cost of the printer, but how much it is going to cost you for actual printing. Depending upon how much you use your printer, you may end up paying quite a bit for ink costs over the year.
Here are a few useful tips to help get the most from your printer and ink.
1) Look At Cost Per Page
Before buying a printer, compare per page costs at PCMag.com. Sometimes more expensive cartridges are cheaper in the long run because you get more printed pages for the price. Determine the cost per printed page and the amount of printing that you typically do. Compare costs between both inkjets an toner cartridges to determine which type will be most economical for you.
2) Do Your Printing At Home If Cost Effective
If you typically have print jobs you send to a print shop, consider the financial aspects of using your own printer and ink at home. You may find that you can save money by using your own printer, Brother printer cartridges, and additional equipment for brochures and other print jobs, making your printer virtually pay for itself over time.
3) Choose The Automatic Duplexer Feature
Business printers, as well as some consumer printers now come with the duplexer features that allows both sides of the paper to be printed. This can save you a lot of money on paper during the course of a year by economically using both sides. These printers also have a setting you can switch to if you choose one-sided printing.
4) Decide If You Really Need To Print A Page
Before you print something, check to see how many pages the document will use. You may find that a small amount of material you wish to print is only printable within another ten pages of content. If you can copy/paste the part you wish to print, you can save a lot of paper and ink that would otherwise be wasted on the excess pages you don’t need. For example, when printing driving directions from a map website, if you don’t desire the map to be printed, choose the text only option to get straight to the directions without wasting expensive ink and paper.
5) Adjust Printer’s Driver And Software Settings For More Economical Printing
Go into your printer’s setting by accessing the Control Panel, finding your printer, and opening the printing preferences tab. You will find various settings for print quality options. Unless you are printing something that requires professional quality, choosing options such as quick printing can make your ink last much longer. Print in Draft mode when possible, and avoid printing in color unless you really need the color option.
6) Try A Reputable Third Party Ink Cartridge
Manufacturer’s ink cartridges can be quite expensive, so sometimes you can save money by going with a refurbished ink cartridge or third party ink source. However, sometimes these cartridges tend to be of lesser quality and can really clog the nozzles on the printer. Do your research on third party cartridges by checking out reviews left by others who have purchased and used the product. Finding a quality third party ink and taking good care of your printer by cleaning the nozzles should alleviate the problem of clogging.
7) Other Issues
Don’t buy too much ink or toner at once, as once they age past their “use by” date you may have issues with clogging. Keep only fresh ink on hand and only buy a lot when doing high volume printing. Also, don’t prematurely change your ink cartridges just because you have a low ink warning. Many times the printer will continue to print just fine for some time after the warnings start, so just pay attention to see if the colors are beginning to look strange, or if the printed page is otherwise not correct before changing. Changing cartridges too soon can end up wasting a lot of ink and costing a lot of money.
When shopping for a printer, you should choose the right printer for your personal needs and use these tips to help conserve ink, paper, and money. Get the most from your ink cartridges and printer by following these simple tips.
Great points brought up about printing costs. I only print what is necessary to print and only keep the rest saved in a cloud based service. Google docs is excellent. Print only what you need.
It is extremely rare for me to print anything unless it is super important. Printing can be wasteful as you had pointed out.
My previous printer didn’t have the duplexer feature, and I manually re-inserted the odd-sided printed pages to print the even sides. Problem is, it frequently gripped 2, 3 sheets of paper simultaneously and messed up my page order as its roller wasn’t designed to sift re-inserted papers. So, don’t even think about re-inserting your papers to make up for the duplex function!
Goes to show it’s worth every penny in paying a little bit extra to get one with the duplexer feature 🙂
Great post. I work from home, so a lot of these tips will really help me out. I ended up getting a printer that can also scan/copy/fax and print photos to try to get the most bang for my buck. Plus, when you’re working from home having everything in one machine helps cut down on clutter.
I had one of those all-in-one printers before. The problem I had with mine was that one function can be compromised in favor of another. It could print quality images but the scanner function was just terrible. Also, you are most likely not able to use all the functions at once. You cannot print and scan at the same time. You cannot fax a document while it is still printing. With that being said, I still think a multifunctional printer is an absolute choice in terms of productivity and efficiency in the office.
hello Peter
Great article again on the Web, Thanks for Sharing the tips to Save Printer Cost, but main reason to Land on this Web, bcoz i am Planning to buy a Color Printer, Can you Share a Link for Best Printers here or Mail me. Thanks for your Additional Article to Save Printers Costs 🙂
I don’t have any favorable brands. Depending what you will be using the printer for, I think any printers within your budget would be fine, Sahil 🙂
I never even thought to go in and change the settings. Printing has become a very large part of my budget now and every penny counts especially when printing hundreds of pages a day. Thanks for the tips!
Hey I think you missed out one important point that is re-filling the cartridges. I personally use a Laser-Jet printer and most of my clients ask for Ink-Jet printer because consumer level Laser-Jets don’t print color. And the best cost-saver for anyone is refilling the same cartridge from any general or computer store. Say for example a Laser-Jet cartridge costs $50 then refilling it here in India costs only $6 which saves a lot for me personally. And even a home use Ink-jet cartridge costs $12 dollars then refilling it costs only $4. I hope this too is a useful way to save money on Printing costs
Oh yeah, re-filling is one of the ways to save printing cost too. Thanks for adding that, Abhishek!
I’ve found it useful to check how much ink is contained in cartridges. Often, the cheaper printers cartridges have very small capacity, and the expensive cartridges contain much more ink.
The Automatic Duplexer Feature looks like a smart thing to use. Thanks!
Really useful article on ways to reduce the cost of printing. For many years I have been using various techniques for this i.e. adjusting quality settings, manually feeding it back for back to back printing, printing only what is necessary. Another approach I tried and has worked great for me is using remanufactured and compatible cartridges ones from reputable companies as these were way cheaper than the originals without compromising much on quality, in fact I did not notice any quality difference at all. This also meant that I am reducing my carbon print by recycling.