Are ink costs breaking your budget?

With Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) Printing ink working out more expensive than vintage champagne per millilitre, it makes sense to look at your printing and ink costs

You may feel that there is no other option, as the OEM brands suggest, if you don’t use their expensive products, the warranty will be void, the cartridge will not work properly or it will even damage the printer, this is generally not true.

It is also reported that sensors in ink and toner cartridges report them as being empty even when they are not, automatically deciding when the cartridges should run out and stop printing. If you check online there can be “solutions” available to by-pass this problem.

Buy cheap ink cartridges and toners online

The cheapest place to buy branded as well, as third party and re-manufactured inkjet cartridges and laser toners is usually online, internet retailers are on average, much cheaper than buying the same products on the high street. However, you need to allow for delivery time when buying online.

Check shelf life and don’t over order, it’s disappointing and wasteful to find the sealed cartridge that has been on the shelf for a long time has dried out, although laser toners keep a lot longer.

Store unopened cartridges in a cool, dark place in the upright position.

Change Your Font

Changing the font you use in documents can have a real impact on ink use when printing. Try changing the default font for emails from Arial to Century Gothic, it has been reported that this font requires about 30% less ink, which can cost £1,000s per gallon. Times New Roman, Microsoft’s default, set at 12 point goes furthest, producing 27% more pages than Arial, and Verdana produces the fewest printed pages.

Print in draft or black and white

If quality isn’t important in what you’re printing, change your settings to save ink. It will print faster as well.

Use email or social media instead of printing

Share memos and interesting articles digitally, also forward multi page documents as PDFs, removing the need to drop a sheaf of 30 pages onto everyone’s desk. There’s virtually nothing you might be accustomed to printing that you can’t reproduce in digital form instead. What’s more, you can archive, index, and search these files much more quickly than paper files.

Cleaning out your Printing Fund

Inkjet printers use some ink to clean their print heads when turned on, ensuring you get consistent quality every time you print. A side-effect of this process is that your printer ends up wasting some of the ink that you’ve paid for – ink that will never make it onto the page, so you won’t even get to use all of the ink you’re paying for.

Switch a printer off or leave it on?

Leaving a printer on standby at all times may seem like a waste of electricity, and would add to your electricity bills, but could waste far less ink if it was only occasionally switched off, compared to being turned off between uses.

The ink cost of printing 50 pages in quick succession can sometimes soar up to a factor of 7 if you only occasionally print and switch it off in between.

Of course, the idea of saving up all your prints and running them all off in one go can be helpful to get the lowest costs per page, but sometimes when you need to print, you need to print.

Using clever fonts, making ink jet and toner cartridges last longer as well as saving paper are all bottom-up ways to cut printing costs.