If you print regularly in any significant volume, you’ve probably taken the time to find an economical source for bulk paper and purchase a printer suited to your specific needs and budget. However, besides these significant choices you may still be using up your toner cartridges unnecessarily fast. These three tips can increase the efficiency of toner and paper use to save you more money (while also cutting down on paper accumulation and waste).
N-Up Printing
Simply put, this means increasing the number of pages (n) printed on a sheet of paper by shrinking the size. Presentation professionals have been using this method for years to print slide and presentation notes. However, it is also an effective technique for archiving—reducing the number of sheets for a document saves money, but it also saves storage space. Many applications will support this feature directly, but you can also set it in your printer “preferences” or “properties.” Two pages per sheet is a common size, but you can increase your n as high as 16 (of course you’d probably need a magnifying glass to read it). The smaller print size also saves toner.
Duplexing
Many office printers support duplexing—double-sided printing, but it is usually not the default. It’s quite simple to enable this feature from the printer itself or through the printer settings on your computer. If you have trouble, consult your printer manual. For home users, with a little time and effort you can figure out how to manually duplex your printing by feeding printed pages back through to print on the blank side. This becomes a problem for multi-page documents, but a stack of paper printed on one side can also be flipped over and reused—again saving paper costs.
Lower Toner Consumption
By default, your printer is probably operating in high-quality mode and using the maximum amount of toner for every print job. By switching to “Draft” or “Economy” mode, you can save as much as fifty percent on your cost per page. Many printers feature a button to activate this mode, otherwise you can set it through your computer Printer Settings. Your printing might be slightly lighter, but the difference is negligible. Even if you only use this for everyday printing, the cost savings are significant.
Each of these tricks is small and easy to implement, but the combined savings can be signficant over the long term. Besides reducing your cost per page, you can also reduce paper waste and storage space, and even time spent poring through stacks of documents and records.
By changing the way you print, you can save time, money and the environment!
