7 Ways to Save Money on Your Printing Costs
Here are ways to save money on your printing costs.
- Draft print mode
Using up to 50% less ink than normal print modes, you can save a huge amount of money at a small sacrifice to quality. Avoid using this for any official documents or image printing you are doing, but for run-of-the-mill printing, it is a great little money saver. - Grayscale printing
Needless colour in your kid’s homework graphs or bright family letterheads? If you can live without the colour, select grayscale in your printing options. This will predominantly use your black cartridge, saving the more expensive colour cartridges for your important pages. Note some printers will still use a small amount of colour to create the grey shading, but it is significantly less than what would be used otherwise. - Duplexing
Gone are the days of manually feeding pages back into the printer to get text on both sides, duplexers now do it for you and better yet – are available in a huge range of printers, even some budget ones! Saving time and effort, it is well worth selecting this option in printer settings and halving your paper costs. - Printing with Low Ink levels
Colour cartridges are more expensive, that is a given. What many users do not realize is when your black ink level runs low, some printers will begin to mix all three colours to make black to finish the print job. If your printer guide highlights this function, you must keep a close eye on your black ink levels, otherwise you will print away your colour (and thus gold!) at a sickening rate. - Limit how many times you print
Now, I do not mean stop printing. This is just to highlight, why send a print request of 5 copies of something at 10 a.m., and then come back to print 6 copies of something else at 10:15 a.m. Laser printers must warm up and Inkjet printers lubricate their print heads each and every time they start a new print job. If you send prints together, it minimizes the amount they must do this – saving ink, power and money! - Limit how many times you turn on/off
Certain inkjet printers perform print head cleaning every time they turn on – using a fair amount of ink. If this delightful ‘perk’ is listed in your user manual, ensure you either limit how often the printer is turned off, or only turn it on when you have a reasonable amount of printing to do. - Paper Settings in Printer Options
A well-hidden trick-of-the-trade, the paper settings can sway your ink usage hugely. Different papers have varying absorption levels and ink dispersion rates, which are pre-programmed into the printers. Go through the printer options (print – properties – paper type), and confirm it matches the paper you are printing onto.
