In the computer industry (as in any milieu elsewhere), all means are good for big companies to earn a Max of money… Electronic level, you have programmed obsolescence, that is to say basically that your devices have been calculated for a lifetime that would normally hold the time of your warranty but not too much. (A screen has 2 years warranty? Your screen will most likely hold 2 years and a few weeks, but no more, story you had to buy a new one).
At the printer level, it's not too much at the level of the devices themselves that are causing problems, but the ink they use! Manufacturers do everything to push for the consumption of cartridges:
- ink cartridges dedicated to the printer, impossible or difficult to find generic cartridges
- smaller volume of ink for theoretically greater capacity
- counting chip limiting the number of printed sheets even if there is still ink
- black ink cartridges and separate colors but requiring all to be full to be able to print (like you have more blue ink, but even if you want to print in black and white, the printer will reject it)
- completely illegible draft mode forcing you to go through a print quality that uses much more ink
- printing a busy test page so that it uses as much color ink as possible from the very first printed page
- a multifunction printer with built-in scanner? Can't start the scanner if one of the cartridges is empty…
And this excessive consumption of ink makes you empty your wallet, but in addition, is not at all ecological!
Tips for paying less for ink cartridges
Here are a variety of tips to help you save ink from your printers:
Ecofont
Ecofont is a software that transforms your writing fonts (also called fonts) such as Arial, times news Roman, Calibri, etc… When you print. What's so special about it? There are empty areas in the line of writing! Invisible to the naked eye (normal writing size, 11 px), these holes do not change the design but save you your ink!
Paid software, downloadable demo version here.
Ecofont also offers you a font, the Vera Sans regular, free and already transformed, to download here.
Also be aware that it is possible to save ink with your usual fonts but by choosing the ones that consume the least:
It would appear from a study that the Garamon writing font would use less ink than a Times News Novel or a Comic Sans.
Greencloud
Greencloud is a driver that replaces the one in your printer. This allows you to:
- give you an interactive preview of your documents before printing
- Delete empty pages, or without interest in 1 click
- combine multiple pages per sheet of paper
- convert to PDF
- print directly to dropbox, Google Docs,… as a cloud printer (online)
- print on front/back, black and white (different grayscale)
- save ink with 3 levels of ink saving options
Downloadable here.
Printwhatyoulike
PrintWhatYouLike, which translates into French gives "print what you want", is a website that allows you to choose what you want to print from a website.
Some options allow you to choose whether to print the background of the site, the images, reduce the characters, etc… By clicking on the different elements that make up the Web page you want to print, you can delete, change the size, isolate all items.
Example with Pandoon Cave: https://www.printwhatyoulike.com/print?url=pandoon.info
Website: http://www.printwhatyoulike.com
Spring friendly
PrintFriendly is also a website that allows you to print a webpage by saving your ink. Less pushed than PrintWhatYouLike, this one automatically removes everything that is site background and layout. You can delete all images in one shot or one by one. The text can be enlarged, shrinks or deleted.
Example with Pandoon Cave: http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpandoon.info
Website: http://www.printfriendly.com
Don't hesitate to give yourself your own tips! You can also find more tips here