Cut-price prints

There are fewer hidden costs for inkjet printers, the main one being the occasional replacement of the print head in certain models.

Budget printers have disposable print heads built in to cartridges containing three colours of ink. These, however, have two drawbacks.

First, every time the ink is changed, you’re effectively buying a new print head. Also, when one colour of ink runs out the entire cartridge has to go in the bin.

In more expensive inkjet printers, the cartridges are nothing more than ink tanks and can be replaced individually so none of the ink is wasted.

If you’re looking to buy a new printer we recommend avoiding anything with disposable print heads or multiple inks in a single unit.

Putting it all together
The true print cost per page can be seen as the purchase price of your printer plus the estimated cost of maintenance parts, divided by the number of pages you expect to print before disposing of it.

To this figure must be added the cost of paper and the ink or toner. It is the cost of ink and toner that is most difficult to calculate.

When manufacturers state the estimated print life of ink or toner cartridges, their figure is based on an average A4 page with only five per cent coverage, so if you regularly print text with graphics or photographs, you’ll get far fewer pages than estimated.

The only way of knowing exactly how many pages can be produced per set of ink or toner cartridges is to keep an ongoing log.

What a log like this would most certainly reveal is that the cost of ink or toner will be the most expensive concern, with the printer’s purchase and maintenance costs coming second.

Compared with these, the cost of plain printing paper at around 0.5p per sheet is relatively insignificant, but the use of specialist or photographic papers bumps up page costs.

Because the purchase and maintenance costs of printers are fixed, the key to saving money is to use less ink or toner, to avoid waste, and to print on the cheapest paper capable of producing the desired output quality.

To save even more, switch to non-branded consumables or try refilling cartridges – we will discuss the pros and cons of these approaches later.

Think before you print
Before looking at specific money-saving tips for inkjet and laser printers, here are some suggestions you can implement immediately, whatever sort of printer you are using.

Before printing, ask yourself whether it needs to be printed at all. Maybe you could send the file by email or publish it on a website.

If you need multiple copies, consider whether photocopying or commercial printing might not work out cheaper.

Develop the habit of proofreading text on the screen instead of on paper, and before printing pictures, tweak them in an image-editing application.

Don’t reprint an entire document if you’ve only changed a single page. Select only the changed page to be printed.

Save paper by printing text documents on both sides. This may mean feeding the paper through twice for odd and even pages.

Use whatever draft or economy mode options are available for the printer. These are accessible by clicking on Properties in the Print dialogue box. On some printers, draft mode is good enough for final copies.

Finally, use the option within programs such as Microsoft Word to print two pages side by side on a single sheet of A4 paper.

The text is automatically scaled down to fit the page, so this saves both ink and paper.

In Word, go to the File menu, and select Print. In the lower right-hand corner is an area titled Zoom. Pick the number of pages per sheet, and you’re away.

Typically, two pages of copy per A4 printed page is the most legible, but play around with font size and see what works the best.