How to Save a Bundle on Printing Costs
August 19th, 2007 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 12 CommentsTweet This
If you print a lot of documents, and especially if you support a number of color printers, you’re aware of the staggering costs of ink and toner. The printer business works on the classic razors and razor blades business model, where the central device costs next to nothing, but blades, ink cartridges and toner cost a fortune. The good news is that by setting your printers to print standard documents in Draft mode, and then switching to better output quality only when you need to, you can save a bundle.
Especially on color inkjet printers, even on-the-fly tasks like printing out Mapquest driving directions can eat up a lot of color ink, because the directions tend to occupy half a page, and then you get several pages of annoying color advertising output. In this post, I’ll go over how to set Draft mode up for Windows and Mac users.
If you’re a Windows user, bring up the Printers and Faxes choice under the Control Panel (if you’re running Windows XP, select Start, Settings, Printers and Faxes). Right-click on your printer and select Properties. Depending on what printer you use, the Properties dialog box and tabs within it will give you a few options for stepping down from the highest output quality choices. Resolution, color versus monochrome choices, and turning optimizations on and off are what to experiment with.
If it’s a color printer you’re working with, you should be able to choose black-and-white as your default. When you need high output quality, in most applications when you select File, Print you’ll find that the Print dialog box lets you step up your output quality for that particular print job.
For Mac OS X users, the process is even easier. The Print Center and Printer Setup Utilities give you easy options for stepping down your default output quality. Give Draft mode a try, especially if you’re frustrated with the astronomical costs for ink and toner.
Finally, did you know that you can choose to have your ink cartridges refilled for a fraction of the cost of buying new ones? Some users don’t like to take advantage of this because they worry that their print heads will clog up or output quality will suffer, but I havent’ found these to be problems. Cartridge World is found in stores all around the country and you can use their Store Locator to find a refill spot near you.
Do you have any good printing tips?
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For the more serious users, you can also purchase your own fillable ink systems…
You can buy large pots of toner powder, which is enough to fill up an entire toner with one pot, these are usually at a fraction of the price of a full retail cartridge. As a specific example, the Samsung ML2010 printer, is sold online for around £50. Its cartridges are of a similar price, £50 for a 110g toner cartridge; if you look in the right place, you can purchase 3 110g pots for £15, saving you a total of £135 in toner cartridges. This is also a more green system, as with those three pots you’ve used the original toner cartridge, and have not disposed of any empty cartridges.
Also, for inkjet printers, you can purchase “Continuous Ink Systems”, or CIS for short. These can also save you a bundle on ink prices, as well as having the same green effect of only using 1 set of cartridges. As a typical example, the Epson R1800 (£300 a3 printer), for a full set of cartridges (each holding 80ml of fluid) will set you back a whopping £60. You can purchase a CIS for this system for £60 (much cheaper on ebay), and a set of 800ml tubs of ink, for £55. You’ve spent the price of 2 sets of cartridges, but have 10 worth in ink, saving you over £500.
Many systems like this, although not as quick as changing settings for your printer, can save you literally thousands a year in printing costs. For more information, just Google “Continuous ink systems” for those with inkjet printers, and for those with Laser printers, Google “Toner refill”. You’ll find prices which normally are exceedingly cheap compared to even the cheap ink cartridge sets.
I will also vouch for Cartridge World. Not to sound like an ad for them, but I tried WalGreens and a few other places for refills, and they all seem to funk it up. And Cartridge World actually fixed the messed up carts for free.
Now if I could just get my wife to stop printing 100 page dissertation proposals every day…
I have been buying refilled toner cartridges from inkfarm.com for years. Will all refills, you will occassionally get a bad one, but you still come out way ahead of buying new ones every time. I have also tried the toner refill kits and they work very well too.
Check out TonerInStock (http://tonerinstock.com/). They have an exchange program where you can send in your old catridge and get the refill for half the price.
And anyone doing more than casual printing should invest in a laser. Inkjets are ridiculous.
There is also software for Windows called InkSaver (www.inksaver.com) that works with every InkJet printer. It gives you a slider to choose from 0-75% ink savings. I have been using it for years and love it!
It’s only a matter of time until someone figures out a way to create an App that will make printers and the expensive ink that they gobble up a thing of the past..
I could see the printer manufactures eventually giving printers away.. just like a DVD player.. The big bucks have always been in supply the extras!!!
cheers,
joe
I can vouch for the Epson R1800, I spent a lot of money on cartridges and then changed to CIS, I had some problems getting it working and wasted a bit of ink but it works perfectly now.
If you really wana save on your printing cost, switch to refilled cartridges. Stores like Cartridge World deals in refilled cartridges, which are available at approximately half the price of a new cartridge, without any compromise in quality.At Cartridge World one can have almost all types ink and laser toner cartridges refilled for home and business use.Additionally, refilling the cartridge protects environment by reducing waste.