If you’re shocked by the costs your printer incurs—and who
isn’t?—then this guide is for you. Learn how to slash printing costs by
making some simple and free tweaks to your printing routine and print
settings.
Printing costs, especially if you have an inkjet printer, are
astronomical. Today we’re taking a look at techniques you can use to
minimize your printing costs. The majority of the techniques don’t cost
you a dime and those that do will save you piles of cash in the long
run.
Rethink the Whole Idea of Printing
The first thing you can do to save huge chunks of money in the
printing department is to rethink your relationship with printing. It’s
the 21st century. We don’t
need a hard copy of everything.
There are dozens of ways that information can be transferred and
manipulated that doesn’t involve a printer. You might already be pretty
conservative with your printing practices but consider just a few of the
ways you can cut back:
Email documents to the recipient instead of printing
them. This seems painfully elementary but quite a few people,
especially in corporate environments, have simply got in the habit of
firing up the printer left and right when it would be cheaper, more
efficient, and environmentally friendly to email the document.
Use your smartphone for directions instead of
printing a map—an added bonus here is that you can get new directions
automatically if you screw things up. Even if you don’t have a GPS
enabled phone just cutting and pasting the directions for use on your
phone helps.
Transfer articles to your tablet or smart phone for comfortable away-from-computer reading. Tools like
Send to Kindle for Google Chrome and
Read It Later’s support for sending articles to your ereader
make it easy to shuttle what you want to read to your portable device.
With a little digging you can find all manner of tools for your specific
device or reading needs.
These are but a few examples of how you can keep things digital and cut down on your printing costs in the process.
Outsource Big Printing Jobs
Home printing and the accompanying printers have never been intended
to take over the role of your local copy shop or photo lab. Sure it’s
convenient to have a home printer to print whenever you want but you’re
paying a premium for that convenience. When you factor in the cost of
the printer, the cost of the ink/toner, the cost of the electricity, the
wear and tear, and the paper cost you’re either paying more than you
would at a copy shop or breaking about even. Sometimes breaking even
isn’t really breaking even either, especially when it comes to color and
photo printing where home machines generally give lackluster results.
Speaking of color photos, don’t print them at home. The amount of
money you’ll spend chasing lab-quality prints is high and the chance
you’ll end up with the same quality that the ten cent 4x6s from your
local Walgreen’s photo kiosk have is low. At any reasonable consumer
price point you’re just not going to get the kind of quality that will
ensure your photos still look good a few years down the road. For small
volume printing those photo kiosks are actually a great deal compared to
trying to print photos at home. Doing a lot of photo printing? You
should use a price comparison service
like this one
to find the best value for your needs. If you’re willing to wait a week
or two to get the prints in the mail you can save a mint.
For the most part the same thing applies to color documents. The
crappiest color copier at your local copy shop is still ten times better
than that inkjet you got free with your computer—and way cheaper for
you to use for your intermittent color printing needs.
Think in terms of cost and wasted material. If you print color pages a
few times a year then it’s a complete money sink for you to have an
inkjet printer. Spend $5 on a flash drive and use that to cart files
back and forth to the copy shop when you need a presentation printed.
Adjust Your Printer’s Output
That’s all well and good, you say, but what about saving money with
the printer sitting on my desk right now? Fair enough! As much money as
you can save by reducing your printing needs and outsourcing the large
and/or costly jobs, you can save even more by making small changes.
First, get in the habit of looking at print jobs with the lens of
“What can I do to reduce the size of this job?” at all times. Some
things are simple to do like using the
print preview
button to make sure you’re not printing blank pages at the end of the
web site you’re about to print off. If you’re not using the print
preview you’re just asking to end up with all sorts of crap out of the
printer. When you preview you can see if the document will look the way
you want on the page and you can also see if the last page will, for
example, be nothing but the web site footer and a big ad for Car Fax.
Second, start shrinking your print size. Can you
shrink to fit the page and still read it? Can you double your printing mileage by
2-upping or even 4-upping your document?
As long as you have your reading glasses handy 2-up for regular
documents and 4-up for presentations like PowerPoint slides are
completely legible. Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word, and most major
document reading and editing applications support shrink to fit and n-up
page printing.
Switch to draft mode as the default setting.
Depending on your printer the actual title will vary. Some companies
call it “draft mode” others call it “toner saver”, “print saver”,
“economy” and so on. Regardless of the name it’s a setting or series of
settings that allow you to dial back how much ink and toner your using.
For simple things like articles and basic documents you’ll likely not
even notice the difference. If you do notice it won’t likely decrease
your ease of reading. What it will do is radically cut down on how much
ink and toner you’ll laying down on the paper.
Start Selectively Printing
Earlier we suggested using the print preview in order to see what
your printer was cranking out before it wasted the ink. Selective
printing is an even more aggressive approach where you hack out or
otherwise edit prints before they spool up, saving yourself a bundle in
the process. A variety of solutions exist to help people conserve ink
and toner by selectively printing.
When printing from the web,
PrintWhatYouLike.com is a great resource for on-the-fly web site editing. By either plugging in the URL to their web site or launching
the bookmarklet—seen
in the screenshot above—you can quickly and easily edit a site and pull
out the content you don’t want. Want the article, a few of the how-to
photos you might need to reference, and that’s it? Go ahead and click on
(and delete or resize) all the elements you don’t need. You can adjust
the font size, selectively edit, and otherwise reduce the footprint of
the document.
Other web and bookmarklet-based solutions you may want to look at include
The Printliminator,
MyPage, and
Print Friendly.
If you want that functionality built in to your browser instead of using a third-party site or bookmark you should check out
Printee for Internet Explorer and for
Google Chrome,
Print Edit for Firefox, and
Nuke Everything Enhanced for Firefox.
There’s no need to waste your paper and ink printing the ads,
sidebars that can’t be clicked in hard copy, and other web-only
elements.
DIY Savings: Refilling Your Ink and Toner
One final way you can save big is by manually refilling your toner
and ink cartridges. Be forewarned, however, that this is one of those
areas that either goes swimmingly well and you exclaim how you can’t
believe you haven’t been doing it for years or it goes terribly wrong
and you end up either wasting money or outright buying a new printer.
This method is tricky not because it’s insanely difficult to pop a
little cap off a toner drum and dump toner in but because print
companies use all manner of cartridges and accompanying electronic
mechanisms that make things difficult. Some Epson cartridges, for
example, have a microchip on board that keeps track of prints and ink;
you can’t just inject more ink into the cartridge and expect it to keep
on trucking. Other cartridges are much easier to work with–one How-To
Geek reader even showed us how he
prolongs the life of his cartridges by simply injecting water into them.
Fortunately there are plenty of resources online to help you. The
best thing you can do is to search Google for the specific company and
printer model you’re dealing with and do your research. Replacement ink
and toner is available at a fraction of the price of retail ink. Find
yourself a dependable printer that takes well to refills and a quality
source for refill supplies and you’ll have a long and happy
relationship.
Sendoid
is a file sharing client designed to shuttle files quickly between
browsers and desktops with little need for configuration or firewall
tweaking.
