The Best Ways to Save Money on Printer Ink

Home Printing or Printing at Work are essential tasks. Focus on digital learning means School work involves a lot of printing. Covid has increased home office and printing. In commercial offices printing continues to increase even with emphasis on reducing climate change waste. We have all heard the comparisons of printer ink to Gold prices so anyways to reduce ink usage printing are helpful. Useful printing techniques to employ and selecting what printer or ink to suit your requirements.

1. Always buy the XLarge Cartridges (XL) - Much Cheaper in Long-term
2. Avoid buying Printers than use Tri-colour cartridges as they use more ink
3. Buy Multipacks if possible. The bigger packs the better. Big Savings compared to buying Singles
4. Buy A Printer Suited to the Amount of Printing you do
5. Try to Use Calibri and Times New Roman Fonts which use less Ink
6. Print in Black and White Where possible
7. Change Printer to Draft Mode for Less Important Documents
8. Print Double Side on the A4 Pages

Ways to Save Money when Buying Printer Ink:

Get the XLarge Cartridge (XL) instead of Standard Size

HP, Epson, Brother, etc will offer your ink cartridge in different sizes. Standard, XLarge and sometimes XXLarge. Customers tend to buy the standard but it is actually the worst value. On average the standard will have 50% less ink than an XL cartridge but only 15-20% less in price. With toner cartridges these figures can be even more dramatic with XL cartridges sometimes containing 200-300% extra ink toner. The manufacturers will always push the standard size cartridge because of profit hence the higher sales but make sure to check if the XL cartridge is available. The XLarge cartridges are the same size physically as the standard so there will no issues fitting them into your printer.

Avoid Buying Printers than use a Tri-colour Cartridge

HP and Canon offer black and tri-colour cartridges for various printers. On the surface tri-colour cartridges seem like a great idea having 3 coloured cartridges rolled into 1 but in reality, the tri-colour cartridge is much less efficient using more ink than the single colour cartridges. Most users tend to print more of a certain colour and when this colour is empty the tri-colour cartridge will compensate with the other 2 colours.

Buy Ink Multipacks rather than Single Packs

The bigger ink Multipacks containing all the colours etc are much better value than buying single cartridges. Even if your printer says the black only needs replaced go buy a multipack. The savings are very high especially with compatibles as they offer even bigger packs.

Ways to Save Money when Printing:

Is the Printer the Right Fit for You

If you print high volumes make sure your printer is suited for bulk printing. Laser toner printers or EcoTank printers are more cost efficient and faster printing bulk. The smaller printers will be much more expensive in the long-term as they use much more ink even though it is less expensive. Older printers can also be less efficient as the technology can be dated. Keep in mind that the initial cost of buying a new printer will be clawed back in the first year from ink purchases. For example, the Brother DCP-L2510D Laser printer is under 100 Euro to buy and the compatible Toner Cartridges under 50 Euro printing up to 3,000 pages each. The Epson EcoTank ET-2820 printer is available for 200 Euro and the 4 bottle ink packs are 30 Euro printing a impressive 7,000 pages. The smaller printers will usually print 500 pages per cartridge so a massive difference in volumes.

Some Text Fonts Use less Ink in Printing

Hard to believe but what font you use in a document will directly impact the print wastage. Calibri and Times New Roman are 2 of the most efficient fonts and are easier to read fonts too so it’s a good idea to use these. Try to avoid bold text too as it uses more ink.

Print in Black & White when Possible

Black ink is much cheaper than colour so it makes sense to print in black and white where possible. Pictures especially use a lot more ink resources so even a compromised of black and white prints for pictures will benefit.

Change Printer Mode to Draft Mode

It is possible to change printer modes to Draft format printing the documents in reduced quality and so requiring much less ink. Draft Mode will condense the pixel size of prints and one of the benefits is higher print efficiency. The disadvantage is lower print output quality so this may only suit the low priority documents.

Print Both Sides of Printed Paper

Printing both sides of the A4 paper will reduce the printed paper volumes by 50% as it will require half the pages to do each document. This will save 50% on paper costs. In a bust office this can be a substantial saving.