Reducing printing ink cost

So it’s understood, we are all making an effort to protect the trees and save the planet by printing less and keeping information in digital format whenever it is possible. Well, most of the time this is true, but we still need to print every now and then, and in the end we spend more than reasonable money on ink. Have things improved in the last 10 years or so?

Globally they haven’t but the industry has come up with a few little innovations that help to alleviate the pain. This is no miracle solution but every bit counts and helps.

Epson is the company leading the colour ink-jet market, the type of printer that is frequently used at home and in small offices, the places where expenditure hurts most. Epson has released a series that uses tanks of ink that can easily be refilled with ink sold in inexpensive bottles, instead of having costly cartridges that you throw away and completely replace with new cartridges.

By designing high capacity tanks and saving the user the cost of disposable cartridges, the company’s L series (L300, L800, L810 models) significantly reduces ink cost over time. Other manufacturers have adopted the concept that has proven to be very environmentally friendly, though you still find on the market printers’ models that use disposable cartridges.

And then there are tips.

Remember that your printer has a draft mode. For simply reviewing a text, properly sizing a photo or printing simple notes that you will discard anyway in a few minutes or hours, selecting the draft mode consumes less ink that the regular or the high quality modes. Even better, first print in black only until you are satisfied with the contents, then you can shift to colour printing for the final copy.

Of course, when your printer tells you to buy ink for you’ll soon be running out of it, follow the wise advice but don’t actually replace the cartridge until you really can’t print at all.

The ultimate savings can be achieved by using compatible inks, but this has to be done wisely, carefully.

Compatible inks are made and sold by third party manufacturers, i.e. not by the original maker of the printer like Epson or HP, to name the main two giants. These third party inks can be 60 to 70 per cent less expensive than the original ones. However, whereas buying Epson or HP ink is an absolute guarantee of quality, finding reliable third party ink is more difficult, for you may get a product that will result in degraded printing quality or may even cause printer damage. A thorough search should still lead you to finding good quality third party inks and save significant amounts of money this way.

Some technical reviews found on the Web say that even the best quality compatible inks will cause some damage to your printer in the end. It may be true, especially when it comes to laser printers, but the actual cost over time has to be properly evaluated. If compatible inks ruin your printer after say 10 ink replacements or more then the savings you would have made on ink will be noticeably higher than the price of a new printer! You still win in the end. We all know that, typically, printers are not expensive but ink is.

Perhaps the smartest, simplest way to save money on ink for printers is to print less. Back to square one.