Some of these helpful tips and tricks you may know, others may be new.
- If you have a colour printer, make it a practice to print draft copies in ‘black’ only – or use a ‘greyscale’ setting. While there will always be a slight usage from other color cartridges anyway, this habit will ultimately reduce your use of pigment and related cost over time.
- Your printer doesn’t know how much pigment is actually in your cartridges. If there’s a gauge of any kind, it’s based on a calculation on page numbers. The only true guide is the quality of the actual printed sheet. With this in mind, it may be worth turning your printer off, removing all cartridges, re-setting the page counter, then re-loading your cartridges. Having said this, it’s always prudent to carry a spare set of cartridges to cover you for when they eventually run out.
- In the case of ‘toner’ cartridges, the practice of removing the cartridge and giving it a side-to-side shake will help to re-distribute the toner within the cartridge. Ultimately this helps all toner to be used, rather than to have valuable residues discarded.
- Make a realistic judgement on your printing use. If you predominantly print text documents, maybe a small mono-laser printer is all you need. In which case these come at a cheap purchase price, and while you might pay $60 for a ‘black’ cartridge, you’re likely to get more than 2.5 thousand pages printed per cartridge. In the long-run this could be very cost-effective.
