Printers – cutting costs

There are two main types of Printers nowadays. Ink jet (All in one’s) and Laser printers.

The most popular option is ink jet printers, which do colour printing, scanning and copying. However,

they can be expensive to run if you are printing a lot, with a set of cartridges often costing as much as the printer itself!

So what can you do to reduce these costs? Well first of all some customers buy non genuine cartridges which can be much cheaper than the ink jet manufacturer ones, however can lead to problems such poorer quality colour reproduction and not being recognised by the printer.

However, some manufacturers such as Hewlett Packard (HP) now offer an Instant Ink plan, where you can print a certain number of pages per month for a monthly fee and they automatically send you replacement ink when it runs low. A popular example being 50 pages a month for just £1.99 a month which is just £24 a year – less than a set of replacement cartridges!

The other option, is to buy a laser printer. If you print quite a lot and mainly in black and white, laser print cartridges unlike inkjets do not dry up and usually last a year or two before replacement is needed, so work out at excellent value per page and as a bonus printed pages do not run if they accidentally get wet as they are powder based.