Conserving Ink & Printing Faster!

Professional print companies often charge a good amount of money for their services.
If you want brochures, business cards, flyers or mailing pieces, it often costs a lot.
Even going to a local copy mat can often be an expensive and tedious process! I find that I
would rather sit in the comfort of my home office and produce things on my printer.
These days, home printers are so advanced, that they can produce awesome little business pieces
easily.
It helps to have a color printer, but it is not absolutely necessary.
Currently, I have a Lexmark Z53 color printer and have been very impressed with the quality.
The cartridges tend to last a long time, and the little work-horse machine prints fast!
If you are looking for a color printer, I can highly recommend Lexmark. You can find these on
eBay for around $100 or visit their website at www.lexmark.com.
And you really don’t need anything fancy…a $100-$150 printer has lasted my business through
2 years and is going strong.

Before we get into the specifics, I think I should mention one thing about print cartridges…there
is a simple way to conserve ink, print your items faster, and save paper.
Here’s what to do.
On your start menu,
go into the “Control Panel”
Select printers and faxes.
When you see your printer, right click on it and select “Properties”

What we are going to do is set the default settings to “Black and white” & “Draft” quality prints.
The reason we are going to do this is to conserve ink.
I find that more than 93% of the pages I print simply don’t require color.
(Mostly I print receipts and things to read which I eventually throw away anyways)
I’d venture to guess that you don’t need high quality for most of your prints either.
You’ll see that the print quality for draft settings is barely distinguishable from full quality black
and white and also that your printer will print the pages much faster.
So, you’ll be avoiding the hassles of getting new print cartridges and printing faster! (watch your
printer zoom through pages with these settings!)
This can save you lots of time and money, so I suggest you keep these settings.
If you want print something of highly quality, you can manually set the print quality when you
are printing that particular job (which is probably only 5-10% of the time).
Often times I find that I start printing something, only to realize that it is set on regular settings,
using more ink than necessary.
By setting the defaults to draft quality and plain paper, you only have to remember to change the
settings on those somewhat rare occasions when you want to print color or a higher quality black
and white print.

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