Printers are an important part of life today. At home and in the office, very few people can get by without access to a printer in this day and age. It may be only very occasionally that something needs printing, but when a form needs to be filled in by hand that has been downloaded from the internet or when a boarding pass needs to be printed, having your own printer is vital as the alternatives are unappealing. An internet cafe perhaps? Waiting in line at the local library? The problem with a printer however is the running costs. It is no secret that whilst printers are cheap, toner or ink cartridges are not, so if you want to prevent yourself from high running costs year after year, you need to print wisely and save as much money as possible. This article provides 4 very useful tips as to how you can save money with your printing costs.

Whilst it may seem like a wonderful way to get your photographs, printing at home is actually very expensive in the long run because the ink costs are so high. There is also the occasional photograph that gets printed and comes out wrong. Either the paper gets jammed or is loaded into the tray the wrong way and suddenly you find yourself with a totally wasted page of a half printed or a badly printed picture. This is extremely wasteful and just a few of these can really boost ink cartridge costs as it becomes necessary to replace the cartridge so often. Avoid printing any picture of photographs at home so you can keep the printer costs to a minimum.

Printing things from the web is a surefire way to drain your ink cartridge. Unless a page has been specifically designed to be printed, when you print from the web you get a huge amount of advertising, coloured pictures, photographs and advertisement text that gets printed alongside the bit of text you wanted. In a similar way to printing photographs this can be extremely wasteful. Unless you cannot avoid it, do not print anything from websites or your browser based email. There is simply too much ink used to justify it.

If you have a "draft quality" setting on your computer, it is a good idea to use it when printing. Although the quality of the printing will hardly be affected, the amount of ink you save is dramatic because a much lower resolution is used. If the printing is very important, such as a document for work colleagues or a presentation handout perhaps then it may be best to not use this setting, but for anything else "draft quality" is perfectly acceptable. This setting can usually be found in the "File / Print / Print Settings" tab.

Another great tip for saving a fortune on printer ink is to forego coloured printing altogether. Just printing in black and white will save a lot of ink and therefore a lot of money. You can still adjust the settings on the printer so it just uses the black ink to print rather than the coloured, and then simply keep replacing the black cartridge as and when is necessary.

If you follow the above tips and advice then it is possible to keep your printer ink costs at a minimum. Whatever type of ink you need, from a dell 944 ink cartridge to a dell 720 printer cartridge, by printing smartly you will able to prevent replacing the cartridge very often. This will save you a considerable amount of money in the long term. Don't be tempted to print anything off unless it is absolutely necessary either, as this will simply enable the ink to run out in a flash and sometimes the cartridge can cost more than the printer did in the first place.