These days, printer ink will still run you about $20 to $35 per minuscule cartridge, each yielding 400 to 1000 printed pages. In fact, unlike everything else in the world of consumer electronics, ink prices are going up–as much as 30 percent since 2009.
In a business where hundreds of pages are being printed each day, those costs are significant. It’s easy to dismiss a single page coming out of the machine as inconsequential, but with a price per printed sheet (per color used) now hitting anywhere between 3 and 10 cents, a business that goes through 500 sheets a week could be spending $2600 annually on printing–and many times that if staffers regularly print in color.
Printing is a substantial business expense, but ultimately you have more control over it than you might think. Sure, some printing–packing slips, mailing labels, legal paperwork, and so on–may be unavoidable, but there’s a lot you can do to cut printing costs. Here are some ideas, from the relatively painless to the rather aggressive.
Conscientiousness
Do those little email-signature ‘Please consider the environment before printing this email’ notices, followed by a tiny green tree, do any good? (In my experience, when you do print such an email, that message invariably ends up on a page of its own.)
Hey, at least it’s a start. The recycling bins of the world’s offices are crammed full of pages that never should have been printed.
The bottom line: There’s virtually nothing you might be accustomed to printing that you can’t reproduce in digital form instead. What’s more, you can archive, index, and search digital files much more quickly than paper files.
Paper Tricks
Another paper-saving possibility is the ‘shrink to fit’ option in Excel and most Web browsers. This setting keeps orphaned text and columns from being cut off when you print a page that’s ordinarily a bit too large for your printer. Using ‘shrink to fit’ can save you from printing lots of sheets with just one or two words (not to mention likely having to reprint the whole job).
Next Page: More Money-Saving Print Strategies
Fun With Fonts
Another simple way to save ink is to use a font that requires less of it. A popular study from Printer.com found that Century Gothic uses so much less ink than industry-standard Arial that a company printing 250 pages a week would save about $80 a year by doing nothing more than switching fonts. The more professional-looking Times New Roman was nearly as cost-effective. You can update the default font in Word through the Change Styles drop-down, and in Outlook through Tools > Options > Mail Format > Stationery and Fonts.
Free Refills
PCWorld has conducted significant research into the question of third-party ink cartridges, and the bottom line is that, in most cases, prints made with off-brand ink were as good or nearly as good as their brand-name counterparts. In the case of text and other black-and-white prints, we detected virtually no quality differences. If you need the very best quality from glossy photo prints, investing in OEM ink may be worthwhile. But most people, particularly those who print text, can get by with third-party ink, which can offer a cost savings of up to 70 percent.
Two Printers Can Be Cheaper Than One
It’s a paradox, for sure, but having two printers in the office can be an easy way to save money on printing. How? Dedicate one printer to black-and-white printing, and the other to color. The former should be a high-speed, workhorse laser printer, and the latter should be a printer that you use only for photos.
The trick, of course, is making sure that employees don’t accidentally use the wrong printer for each job. Help them to avoid that error by giving your printers custom names like ‘COLOR ONLY $$$’ and ‘BLACK & WHITE’, and ensuring that the laser is everyone’s default printer.
Extreme Measures
What if all of the above fails? What if your staffers simply can’t curb their printing habits?
One drastic solution, not to be embarked upon lightly, is to take the printers away. You can start by banning individual printers on users’ desks. Workers are less likely to print something if they have to get up and walk to the printer to fetch it. You can also place networked printers near the location of the office manager, or whoever is in charge of maintaining and restocking them. People who get dirty looks because they’re printing too much are likely to self-regulate their usage over time.
From there you can go even further. Turn the printer off two days a week, or even three days. You’ll know when you reach the breaking point, but if your business can get to the point where the printer is off more than it’s on, you might be able to ditch the thing altogether.