How to Save a Bundle on Printing Costs

If you print a lot of documents, and especially if you support a number of color printers, you’re aware of the staggering costs of ink and toner. The printer business works on the classic razors and razor blades business model, where the central device costs next to nothing, but blades, ink cartridges and toner cost a fortune. The good news is that by setting your printers to print standard documents in Draft mode, and then switching to better output quality only when you need to, you can save a bundle.

Especially on color inkjet printers, even on-the-fly tasks like printing out Mapquest driving directions can eat up a lot of color ink, because the directions tend to occupy half a page, and then you get several pages of annoying color advertising output. In this post, I’ll go over how to set Draft mode up for Windows and Mac users.

If you’re a Windows user, bring up the Printers and Faxes choice under the Control Panel (if you’re running Windows XP, select Start, Settings, Printers and Faxes). Right-click on your printer and select Properties. Depending on what printer you use, the Properties dialog box and tabs within it will give you a few options for stepping down from the highest output quality choices. Resolution, color versus monochrome choices, and turning optimizations on and off are what to experiment with.

If it’s a color printer you’re working with, you should be able to choose black-and-white as your default. When you need high output quality, in most applications when you select File, Print you’ll find that the Print dialog box lets you step up your output quality for that particular print job.

For Mac OS X users, the process is even easier. The Print Center and Printer Setup Utilities give you easy options for stepping down your default output quality. Give Draft mode a try, especially if you’re frustrated with the astronomical costs for ink and toner.

Finally, did you know that you can choose to have your ink cartridges refilled for a fraction of the cost of buying new ones? Some users don’t like to take advantage of this because they worry that their print heads will clog up or output quality will suffer, but I havent’ found these to be problems. Cartridge World is found in stores all around the country and you can use their Store Locator to find a refill spot near you.

Do you have any good printing tips?

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