Top 10 Tips on How Printing Smart Can Cut Your Bottom Line

Date AddedOctober 16, 2009 03:09:07 PM

Printing costs money. Inevitably the ink or toner cartridge has a tendency to run out at the most inopportune moment. If you’re wasting paper, productive time and paying too much for laser or inkjet printer cartridges, InkMart has the 10 best tips to reduce your printing costs.

1. Create documents using ecofriendly fonts that use less ink than other fonts, use less bold text, smaller fonts or font sizes, and write concisely.

2. Review and revise your draft documents on your computer monitor, rather than printing and then handwriting edits, if at all possible. This not only saves ink, but lots of paper. Only print your final copy.

3. Optimize your printer settings to default to draft instead of final, print drafts on both sides, print drafts in black and white and only your final in color, and reduce to a 300 dpi (dots per inch) resolution, which is usually sufficient unless you re using high-quality photo paper.

4. Only print what you need. Printing just the parts or certain paragraphs of a document, if you don’t need the whole thing, or printing text only and eliminating the graphics will save you ink and paper by simple changes in your print menu.

5. Always look at your document in the print preview mode before you print to eliminate odd page breaks that may have occurred, check the page numbers to be sure they don’t skip a page or start over, check your headers and footers, etc.

6. Once your printer warns that you are low on ink or toner, you may still have 10-30% left in the cartridge, so don’t change the cartridge until the printer refuses to print any longer. If the quality begins to fade, you might want to remove the cartridge, gently flip it back and forth a little, and replace it, which will often make the ink or toner distribute more evenly.

7. Investigate and utilize software programs that can alert you to potential waste of resources, both paper and ink, and if you don’t really need a hard, printed copy on paper of your document, use a “print to PDF” option, which saves the document as a PDF file and requires no printing or paper at all.

8. In addition to selecting the print text only in your print menu when you print web pages, there are websites that offer a service where you type in the URL of a web page that you’d like to print, and then it allows you to “edit” the page for printing, removing individual items, making them fit the page width better, or even isolate them, and even save your edits as PDF or HTML, again, requiring no printing or paper at all.

9. Choose your ink and toner vendor wisely, not just for the lowest price, but for quality service, inventory, free shipping and volume discounts, and recycling programs. In addition, they should have a great record for accurate delivery (saves gas and time!) and a really easy, quick and reliable order process, to save you time and eliminate ordering errors, along with great customer support.

10. Try to avoid having contracts for purchasing ink and toner or other printer parts supplies, even if they are normally included “free” for your leased printers and copiers, so you can shop around at any point in time. When you lease comes up for renewal, know how many cartridges, drums, etc. you used over the course of the lease, and then ask how much the lease payment will be without the cartridges and other parts provided. You may find that you can save even more money by buying your own from the right ink and toner vendor.

InkMart urges you to consider the cartridge recycling programs available through ink and toner vendors, as well, and some non-profit organizations are now offering programs where you can donate your used cartridges, and the funds they receive for recycling the cartridges go toward assisting their charity.