5 Simple Ways to Reduce Your Printing Costs

Printing is no doubt an essential part of day-to-day business operations. In recent years, OEMs have released refillable cartridges, which enables you to print a lot at lower costs. Today, Chipjet will give you another 5 tips to help you save money on printing costs.

• Buy compatible printer ink cartridges

When you purchase toners or ink cartridges, you can explore compatible ones to replace the branded ones. Compatible cartridges offer comparable quality to the OEMs, but at a fraction of the price (saving 30% or more). So if you generally print text documents, why not consider such economical alternatives?

• Do not replace your cartridge immediately

When the printer finds the volume of ink is below the set value, it will inform you to replace the cartridge. However, you don’t need to act immediately. Wait until the cartridge is really empty (faint print or faded text) and then replace it with a new one.

Reminder: if you use toner cartridges, you can remove the toner and shake it a few times horizontally. This enables you to continue printing with the same cartridge for a little longer.

• Stop turning your printer on and off

Switch your printer off ONLY when it is not in use for a long time. Printers do not require much power when they are in standby mode. But if shut them down completely, they will consume more ink than usual to reinstall themselves when they are connected again, thereby adding to your printing costs.

• Preview before you print

Instead of printing straight away, simply select ‘print preview’ to check the print results. 

When printing unofficial documents, you can decrease page margins or double-line spacing to fit more content in fewer pages. You may also drop down your font size and delete elements like graphics or logos.

• Use grayscale printing

Even if you print just black text, ink from the colour ink cartridges will be consumed because printers will automatically mix all the colours to produce a selected colour, even black. When you do not want to use your coloured ink, you can set your printing preferences to grayscale. The options may include “Black Ink Only” and “High Quality Grayscale”:

1. Black Ink Only

When selecting this option, the printer will print with black ink or toner only, which is suitable for printing text documents.

2. High Quality Grayscale

Though printing in black and white, this mode will consume coloured ink to produce high quality results. Therefore, if you just want a document to come out in all black and white, you are not suggested to choose this option.

Reminder: this method applies only to colour printers. Please follow the instruction of your printer to set grayscale printing.