Does it seem like you are constantly having to buy ink (or toner) for your printer? This can be very stressful as you feel you are being ripped off.
1. Small capacity cartridges in an old printer: Older style printers could only print a few hundred pages at most due to the cartridge capacity. Modern printers now have much larger capacity cartridges (for almost the same price!!) due to customer demand.
2. Quality of your print: For your normal day to day printing you may have the quality setting too high. Look for Draft or lower the Dots Per Inch (DPI) setting. A higher quality setting will use more product.
3. Using Colour needlessly: Did you know that when selecting Black & White you are still using colour? Try to find Greyscale, Greyscale will only use black ink.
4. What you are printing has a huge effect: If you are printing images or photo’s then you will be tearing through ink or toner. Consider getting your photo’s printed at one of the big chains like Harvey Norman or The Good Guys. Also, the amount of text you are putting on a page is a big factor as I said previously.
It’s really important to understand how “yield” is calculated. Every printer company benchmarks their products against an industry standard of 5% product deposition on an A4 sheet of paper. To put that in perspective, all the text in this blog would be about 7%. It’s not a lot of printing. But then again, look at a new car at the dealer, the manufacturer reckons you will go 100 klicks on a litre of petrol too!
