The cost of printers on the market today has reduced, and it is now possible to get a perfectly good printer for any home or small office at a relatively low cost. But once you have bought the printer from a specific brand, generally speaking you are tied into using their ink/toner cartridges which in many cases can be very expensive. In some cases, the ink cartridges can be almost as much as the printer itself!

So how do you save money? Well, there are a few simple changes you can make to help save a significant amount on the cost of your printer ink and toner cartridges:

1. Don’t print everything!
Before pressing print, ask yourself, “do I need to print everything”? You may be printing out some information from a web page, however the web page may have a number of images, made up from a large number of colours, which is going to have a significant effect on the amount of ink used. To get round this, try copying text to word and printing this out. Alternatively, try printing in greyscale.

2. Reduce the size of what you print
The standard text size in Word is 12pt. When printed onto paper, in my opinion, this looks very large (and also quite ugly). Depending on the size of the document, you could save yourself a significant amount of ink by reducing the text size, not to mention the amount of paper you could save. What about other software? With Adobe Acrobat, you can specify how many pages you print onto each peice of paper. If I am printing something out, purely for information purposes, I will print 2 or even 4 pages onto once side of A4 paper.

3. Reduce the quality of what you print
How about quality? Well, unless you are printing your company brochures (which is highly unlikely on a standard office printer) you do not need your printer set on high quality. Even standard quality is often overkill for standard home or office printing. Change you printer setting to low quality and save on your ink/toner cartridges.

4. Deals and returns
Many ink shops will do deals on returned ink/toner cartridges. Depending on how often you do this, the money you could save could impact significantly on the cost of new ink/toner cartridges.

5. Refills
Refills are even better than deals and returns. You don’t pay anything for the ink/toner cartridge, only the ink.

6. Use all of the ink!
The people who make printers can be sneaky. These days printers will tell you when your ink is low and that you should replace you ink/toner cartridge. Don’t be fooled! Ink/toner cartridges will usually last a lot longer than the printer is telling you and there are ways to make them last even longer. Use up all of the ink in the cartridge and then take it out and give it a small shake. Ink often gets clogged in cartridges, so giving it a small shake will break up any clogs and the ink/toner cartridge is likely to last much longer.