Tips to Save on Costly Printer Ink

Isn’t it frustrating when you are halfway through printing something and the “replace ink cartridge” light flashes. It’s a situation we find ourselves in all too often.
As printer cartridge prices continue to soar, it is becoming more and more expensive to be continually printing out the things we want.

Here are a few practical tips to help you cut costs on your home printing expenses.

1. Continuous printing versus occasional printing
How often do you use your inkjet printer? Research suggests that continuous printing—printing loads in one occasion or printing at an hourly interval wastes less ink as opposed to printing infrequently or having longer periods of time in between printing jobs. This means the more seldom you use your printer, the more likely you’ll waste more ink in the process.
Print heads get cleaned with the very same ink in the cartridges. Some printers have an automatic cleaning process once it gets turned on, so if you seldom print, you may be using more ink on cleaning than on what you are actually printing.

2. Review your printer friendly options
Aside from changing the printer setting from colored to black or printing in draft and changing text to ink-saving fonts and sizes, you can also check for printer friendly icons from web pages. These icons that will help you print a version of the pages you need without the unnecessary colors on your print jobs.
You can also download and set up a printer friendly application on your browser where you can choose to delete parts of text or images that you don’t need for your printed version. An example of this application is PrintFriendly.

3. Know where to get inexpensive ink.
If you really want to save on printer ink, you need to know where to get the cheapest ones.

 
Nowadays, you can find more affordable deals online than going to your nearest retailer. You can save even more through third-party vendors on the web compared to your printer ink’s manufacturer without sacrificing the outcome of your prints. In-store retailers can charge twice as much as other retailers and on the average of six store vendors, you can save more than $10 on a black HP 364XL cartridge from third-party dealers. The only catch to this is the delivery time; you need to set a few days for your inks to arrive. Although if you’re after savings, waiting for overnight or next day shipping would be an easier option especially if the nearest ink retailer is miles away from you.
Your inkjet printer has a warning mechanism that lets you know if it’s running low on ink; this will give ample time to place an order and wait for the inks to arrive in time for your other printing jobs.

4. Printing hard copies versus sending PDF copies
Compared to carrying hard copies, reading papers on tablet PCs or document readers are easier and a whole lot practical.

1. You can save on the weight you need to carry around with you
2. You save not only on ink but also on paper
3. Sending your documents electronically as PDFs are secure, fast and reliable. Proofreading, editing and commenting on documents are also done faster, and therefore updated and finalized works are easier to publish or share.

You can convert your documents into PDF or portable document format files through a free PDF converter application such as CutePDF. Once installed, this handy little application gives you the option to save your Windows document as a PDF through the Print drop-down menu from File. Just select CutePDF from the drop-down to save your desired document as a PDF and you can send it to other tablets and document reader.

This informative blog post is brought to you by Fuji Xerox. For information on the best A3 & A4 colour laser printers for your home or office, visit Fuji Xerox Australia