One of the biggest problems that comes with owning a printer is buying and replacing ink cartridges. Printers by Canon, HP, or Brother only use ink cartridges specific to their brand and these cartridges aren’t exactly cheap. With the cost of each cartridge, it’s important for printer owners to make each one last.
Thankfully, there are several tips and tricks people can do to save on ink. Here are five of them to get you started:
1) Switch to Cheaper, High-Quality Alternative Inks
Yes, the word “cheap” often implies low-quality products with a short lifespan. However, there are high-quality ink alternatives available at low cost. High-quality remanufactured printer cartridges are one example.
Unlike Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) inks, it costs less to make remanufactured ink cartridges—30 to 60 percent less, in fact. This, in turn, makes them cheaper for consumers. Though the parts of remanufactured printer cartridges are recycled, manufacturers meticulously check each component to make sure that nothing is worn out. What’s more, remanufactured cartridges help save the environment. Instead of throwing empty cartridges into landfills, they are deconstructed, cleaned, reassembled, and reused.
2) Change Printer Settings
A nifty trick printer owners can do to save ink is to change their printer settings. Before printing any document, it’s a good habit to set the print quality to the fast draft or econofast setting. These print settings use less ink. Even if the text color is lighter in shade, it is still readable. This trick is best used when printing a lot of documents that do not require any high-resolution images.
3) The Beauty of Using Ecofont
Buying the license to use Ecofont may be an additional expense, but its benefits last a lifetime. That’s because regular fonts that are bold or flashy usually use up a lot of ink when printing. But due to Ecofont’s design, which is riddled with small holes, you can reduce ink consumption up to 20%. Don’t think that the holes will affect the text’s appearance because Ecofont is still readable even from afar.
4) Don’t Replace Cartridges too Soon
The low-color or low-toner warning on printers don’t always tell the whole truth. Even when the machine alerts the user repeatedly, it is possible that the cartridge has yet to be emptied. So how can you truly tell if the printer is running low on ink? Only when a printer can no longer print anything, even while it’s on the fast draft setting.
5) Proofread and Double-Check Documents Before Printing
Typos and misprinted pages are the common culprits behind wasted ink. One misspelled word would prompt the user to print out the new, just-edited page, which is neither economical nor environmentally friendly. The best course of action to avoid this is to reread the document multiple times and recheck the printer settings. Once everything looks good, then that’s the only time to click “print.”
As you can see, these five easy tips are very easy to follow. Once doing these tips become a habit, wasting ink and untimely buying new cartridges will be a thing of the past.