8 Ways To Save Money on Ink and Reduce Printing Costs
Jan 20, 2022
Print regularly
For those trying to find ways to reduce the cost of ink cartridges, this may seem like an odd suggestion, but using your printer frequently may really help you save money on printing expenses. There's a potential that your printer ink will dry up if you stop printing for weeks at a time. In such case, you could have to toss away the entire ink cartridge! Printing a test page is a useful technique to know whether printer ink is about to dry out. When you have nothing to print, you can utilize this. A test page may also be used to diagnose a variety of potential problems and assess how well your printer is operating.
If you’d like to learn more, we run through the steps of printing a test page in our blog post How To Save Ink.
Choose an ink-efficient printer
When it comes to how to save on ink cartridges, one major tip is to choose a printer that is ink efficient. An ink efficient printer can help you save money on ink costs. While it might be tempting to buy a cheap printer, these are often machines that aren’t very ink efficient. As such, spending a little extra money on a printer that is efficient with ink may end up saving you ink costs in the long term. There are many different ink saving printers available on the market, and a little bit of research should help you find one that suits your requirements.
Don’t turn off between jobs
While you may think turning off your printer between print jobs can help save on printing costs, the opposite is often true. Many printers use a little bit of ink when they’re booted up, so continually turning your machine off and on between each print job can actually waste ink. Instead, leave your printer on when you know you’ll be printing more pages again the same day. Don’t take this tip to the extreme though, it’s fine to turn your printer off when you’re going to bed!
Use ink-saving fonts
Using ink-saving typefaces is one approach to reduce the amount of ink you spend. There's a ton of different ink-saving fonts available, and the best part is that Microsoft Word comes with a lot of them already loaded. For instance, Word comes pre-installed with two ink-efficient fonts: Garamond and Times New Roman. You may download other ink-saving, efficient fonts, like Ecofont, if you're not content with the ones that come with Microsoft Word.
Save up your prints
Turning a printer on and off repeatedly can use ink, so some people may choose to save all of their printing for one or two days a week. If there are no deadlines in play, this option could be a simple way to save a little bit on printing costs over time.
Check your usage
Keeping an eye on your printer’s ink usage can help you track its performance. To do this, you will likely need additional usage monitoring software. There are multiple different software solutions available that can assist with this task. These programmes can often also provide tips and recommendations for saving on ink and printing more efficiently.
Utilise Print Preview
The Print Preview function can help you save on re-printing costs, by allowing you to give your work a once-over before it’s printed. Needing to print out another copy after you notice an error on the first one not only wastes ink, it also wastes paper (and time!). Make the Print Preview function your friend and you should hopefully save on ink and paper costs over your printing lifetime.
Tweak your printing settings
You may adjust your printing settings to somewhat reduce the ink consumption of your printer. For instance, you could discover that you're still making high-quality prints and utilizing high-quality print settings when you don't really need to. You might choose to set the print quality to draft mode if all you're trying to print are simple documents. If you want to produce a high-quality print, you can always adjust the settings back to a higher quality. This setting saves on ink.
We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about some tips on how to save money on ink cartridges. Many tasks are simple, such as changing your font or using the Print Preview function, and can be implemented in moments to save you a little on printing costs. Some of the other steps, like purchasing an ink-efficient printer, might seem like a large upfront purchase, but could end up saving regular printers money on ink cartridges in the long run. Check out our great range of ink-efficient printers to be able to start your printing journey off the right way.
