Printers can be quite handy to have in your home. They can help you with work-from-home assignments and print a wide variety of documents. They can print photos, scan documents and generate photocopies. However, maintaining a printer can be expensive. One common grouse is the fast-depleting ink cartridges. While claims are usually made about hundreds of prints, the actual number of prints is quite less.
As buying new cartridges is expensive, many people want to get the max prints from their printer. While buying a new cartridge may be unavoidable, you can at least get some more prints by using some usage guidelines. Here are some tips and tricks that can help you get max prints from your printer cartridge.
Select print quality - Your printer will be set to default print settings, which could end up using a lot of ink. You can check to see if your printer has other print settings and customization options. You can use these settings to lower the ink usage per print. You may have to compromise on print quality, but the number of prints per cartridge will increase.
Choose grayscale - While printing text, it is generally believed that only black ink is being used. However, this is not true. Even for text documents, the printer may still be using some amount of color ink. And as is common knowledge, it is the color ink that runs out faster than black ink. If you do not need color prints, you have to choose the 'Print in Grayscale' setting on your printer.
Choose the right font - The font you choose for your documents also determines the amount of ink used during printing. For example, one of the commonly used fonts 'Arial' uses around 27% more ink in comparison to other fonts like Calibri and Times New Roman.
Unless you are specifically required to use a particular font, it will be better to choose fonts that use less ink. When talking about fonts, you may also want to reduce printing in Bold that consumes more ink. For highlighting any specific text, you can use a pencil to underline on the printed document.
Choose a printer with separate color ink cartridges - Most printers have an integrated color cartridge with three inks - Magenta, Cyan and Yellow. Based on what you are printing, it is always possible that one color may get exhausted much earlier than other colors.
So, you will be essentially throwing out the cartridge that still has the other inks remaining. To get over this issue, invest in a printer that has separate cartridges for Magenta, Cyan and Yellow. This way, you can buy only the color that has been exhausted.
Avoid wastage - Before printing, make sure everything is in the right place. Often people find mistakes after printing and then they have to take a reprint. This wastes a lot of ink. By being a bit more careful, you can get more prints from your printer cartridge.
With above tips and recommendations, you can get more prints from your printer cartridge. If your printer is too old, like 5 years or older, you can consider buying a new printer. Newer printers have higher ink efficiency and can get more prints per cartridge. Also, keep your printer in good condition by following the recommended usage and maintenance guidelines.
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