If you print out many articles, instructions, or whatever you think you may want to keep for posterity, you may find yourself in the poor house in a short amount of time.
How to Save Money on Printer Ink
Printer ink is so high priced that the market has perhaps a six- to eight hundred percent profit margin on every cartridge you buy. It only takes a little bit of ink to fill up a cartridge, certainly not the average thirty dollars you pay every time your printer ink needs a refill. It is up to the normal consumer to be careful what and how much he or she prints.
How Can You Make The Ink Last Longer
To stretch the time between ink cartridge purchases, you should first buy a good quality printer. Even though they are costlier initially, they will last you longer, give you better quality documents, have more functions for your convenience and take less ink than the cheaper models do.
If you print a lot, this will save you money on ink. You can do your own analysis and count the number of pages you can print per cartridge. Then divide the page number into the ink expense and you will know how much you pay for each page. This may make you rethink whether you really need that page printed or not.
When You Must Print
There are times when some information is just important enough to keep on paper. You need to print it out but you don’t need to print everything on that web page. Highlight the text you want and tell your printer to print only the selection. That will save you quite a bit of ink, black and colored, by cutting out the advertisements or other bits of information you don’t want.
Print When The Document Is Finished
Don’t waste your ink printing out a document that is still under revision. Do all your revisions on the computer before you get ready to print. You will not have several copies of the same document with only a couple of words different in each version.
Smaller Fonts Use Less Ink
Unless you have trouble seeing, you may be able to read tiny fonts well. You can see how a document that is usually a whole page long with a 10 point or 12 point font, can be reduced to a half page by smaller fonts.
If you can do that with most of your documents, you will save 50% on your printer ink over time. If you really need the font larger on one or two documents, you can always take that page and enlarge it or print it out immediately in a font that is less eco-friendly.
Printing Green
Available software for Mac and PC will alert you of ways to cut corners. If this software notices areas that constitute waste, it will tell you where you can save on ink and paper. In fact, it will tell you how much ink and paper it has saved you.
Printing in less than optimum resolution will also take less ink than when you print a high resolution photograph. In general, 300 dpi are sufficient for good quality printing and will save you lots of ink.