5 ways to save money printing

Whether you’re in a business environment or in your home office, a printer always comes in handy. You may not use it every day, but when you do, you’ll be glad you don’t have to knock on someone’s door to get something printed. At the same time, printing yourself can also be a bit pricey, because you incur costs for ink and paper. That’s why we’ll discuss five ways to save money with printing.

Ink may be cheaper
The main cost of printing is the ink. After all, this is the revenue model of printer manufacturers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to use their own cartridges. They might not recommend it, but imitation cartridges often work just fine too (if you pick the right one for your printer model). You can therefore save money with this type of private label cartridges, but you also save if you opt for XL cartridges. These are not bigger, but better filled. The purchase price is higher, but relatively speaking you pay less for the ink.

Economical fonts
There really is such a thing as economical fonts that use less ink when printing. These are usually sans-serif letters, or thin letters like the Century Gothic font. But there are also fonts that are specially designed to save ink. A free economical font is Ryman Eco, which you can download from the Internet. This font does have serifs, but the letters are only outlined and not filled. You won’t see much of this on a standard font size, while you do save ink. An alternative is Ecofont, which you can download for 20 euros. The letters are full of holes that you only see with an above-average font size.

Print on draft
Not every print has to be of high quality. For personal use, a somewhat lesser quality, especially with text, is often fine. That’s why you should consider printing more often on the ‘draft’ stand. You can find this in the printer settings before you give the final print command. Your print will then become a bit faded, but still legible. This saves a lot of ink.

Using the printer regularly
It may sound strange to recommend using your printer regularly if you want to save money on printing. But if you don’t use your printer for too long, the print heads dry out. This will give you a bad print result. To fix that, you need to flush the print buttons. That happens with (a lot of) your expensive ink. Then it is better to make a small print every now and then to keep the print heads ‘wetted’.

Duplex Printing
Of course, paper also costs money. That’s why it’s worth printing double-sided when this is an option, saving you half the paper. It is useful if you have a printer that can do this automatically. If not, you can do it yourself. You then print the odd pages first. Then turn the stack of prints over and feed the sheets again. Then print the even pages on the back of the paper. Just think about how your printer works first to figure out exactly how to refeed the pages.
It is therefore quite possible to save money on printing if you are more aware of consumption. In addition to being better for the wallet, this is also a sustainable choice.

This article was produced in collaboration with Brother