April 11, 2008

Tip: Save on Ink

Ink is one of the big expenses of the computer industry, and is tightly controlled by printer manufactures. He are some tips for saving money in this area:
You can save a lot of ink by fine-tuning your print settings. Only print with the quality you actually need. For example, my printer has the following options: "Quality: Fast draft", "Color: Grayscale", "Black Print Cartridge Only", and "Light" ink volume. Personally, I see little difference between enabling all of those and the default settings. However, it saves ink, uses only black ink (cheaper on many different levels), and prints very fast (almost violently so).
Also, I recently had to get new ink for my printer - and, as I said, ink can be really expensive. So I started looking around and found I could save a ton if I went with "recycled" ink cartridges (listed on Amazon Used and eBay). Truthfully, I thought the concept to be a bit absurd. But it seemed no one had any complaints (in fact, there was a lot of praise). So I took a chance and got some. It works great. There are a few quirks - I had to tell the printer to disregard the fact I was putting in a non-new cartridge, and it thinks the cartridge is low all the time (but since I usually disregard that warning until I notice quality loss, it doesn't really matter). Considering the next-lowest cost was manufacturer direct (due to free shipping), 20% savings is pretty good.
They're you go - tip served! (I'll expect a check for 10% of the value saved as projected across the rest of your life.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

remind me again why you are doing computers instead of business?