Consumer printers are marketed like razors. The razor handle is inexpensive and comes with a blade or two, but the refills are much more expensive. The same is true of inexpensive printers. A printer manufacturer may lose money selling you the printer initially, but you can be sure they'll make it up when you purchase your next cartridge!
That said, we know that printing costs can be a major expense in the typical home office. Some printers will end up being more expensive than others. For example, an inexpensive inkjet printer that uses one cartridge for multiple colors will be more expensive
to use over time than a more expensive inkjet that has an individual cartridge for each color. That’s the kind of thing we’ll consider in this article.
So, let's get started. Here it is – the ten best ways to save on printer costs.
The current generation of photo-printing capable inkjet printers has brought the cost of home and small office photo printing down below a dime a print with several models priced at less than $100. However, if your printer is a couple of years old and especially if it has only one ink cartridge for both monochrome and color printing, it’s more economical to use online printing services such as HP’s Snapfish. At the time of this writing, Snapfish was offering 4 x 6 inch prints for nine cents each.
There are many other online printing services, too. A good source of information about special offers and online coupon codes as well as user reviews is www.printRate.com.
Can you really save money by refilling your own inkjet printer cartridges? To find out, I compared the prices for a rather common, older Cannon “BJC” home and office printer. www.inksell.com sells the original Cannon cartridge (model BC-05) for $36.05. This cartridge is rated at 300 pages at an actual 15% coverage. Not much of what is printed by a color inkjet is not in color, especially if printing from a web browser, so actual endurance is much less than 300 pages. That’s not cheap!
Next I looked at Automation Consulting and Supply, Inc. refill inks and kits at www.oddparts.com. According to their FAQ, The first time you'll make a mess, the second time you'll spill a few drops, and the third time you'll be a pro. Perusing their website, I found that the BC-O5 cartridge uses cyan, magenta, and yellow inks.
I asked Brian Boley, president of ACSI Bulk Inks and found that the complete kit – a pint each of the colors, syringes for injecting the ink, and shipping runs $96.80. This will produce about 67 refills of this cartridge! However, the print head on the cartridge is only good for five to eight refills, so even with refilling, some new cartridges will need to be purchased.
We’ll need a follow-up article to expand on this topic. (What if you were buying a new inkjet or all-in-one printer and wanted to make sure it was economical to refill? Mr. Boley has some specific recommendations.)
If you commonly print text from your web browser, a good way to save on ink or toner is to only print the text that you’ve selected.
A handy free utility from HP called Smart Web Printing allows users of Internet Explorer 6.0+ (32-bit editions of Windows only) and Mozilla Firefox 2.x to intelligently select segments of a webpage or segments from different web pages and combine them on one page for printing. Smart Web Printing is currently not compatible with Firefox 3, but here’s what it looks like in Internet Explorer.
To use Smart Web Printing, click the icon at the right of the menu bar and click and drag to select text or images. When you release the mouse button, you’ll be given the choice of clipping the content or immediately printing it. In the image above, three segments of my popular, must-read article about installing a SATA hard drive in an external enclosure are visible in the “Clip Book” pane on the right.
The image below shows the Clip Book editing screen. Here the image and two selected (“clipped”) segments have been dragged onto a single page. This was a bit buggy with Internet Explorer 7 and did not work as shown in the Help file. Ironically, the three clipped segments produced eleven pages in the editor! It took a few minutes to drag the outline edges for each page to the minimum space needed, but in the end three different segments of the web page were printed on one sheet of paper.
Currently I would recommend HP’s Smart Web Printing only for Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2.x.
If you’re printing just to check your layout, use the lowest quality setting your printer can manage to save ink or toner. Some printers may not have a setting called “draft” or “quick print.” If that’s the case, you may be able to click “Preferences” and select a lower print quality to achieve the same effect.
Evernote is a Windows, Linux, and Mac OS application that acts as like a combination of a calculator tape and a scrapbook. It can clip from web pages, other applications, PDF files, and then makes it easy to find your information by folder, timeline, and even provides an OCR-like functionality to find text inside graphic files.
It backs the data that you want to access from different PCs and
mobile devices to an online account.
The basic version of Evernote “Web” is free and includes a version that also runs on Windows Mobile devices. There’s even a mobile web version that works with Palm OS devices such as Treos.
For more information about Evernote, please see Evernote Web is Everywhere: It Works!