[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Six Savvy Ways to Get More Prints for Less Money here

[bcrawford]

I have used FinePrint for many years, a great product and paper saver. Use 4 or 8 pages/page, double sided for archiving paper reports or volume distribution. Perfect for PowerPoint slides, get full quarter or 1/8 page layouts rather than PPT's skimpy slides.

[124c42]

There is a free utility called printkey that will let you select any part of any document that you display and let you print or modify it to print. It works great! http://www.webtree.c...intkey_info.htm

[pawn]

Why not use the printer option to print multiple pages on one sheet instead of spending $50 for "Fine Print" or just use the printer's black and white option if you don't want color. Let me know which printers can't do that and I won't buy one. Of course my printer was free so I don't like buying them. Why not use the lowest print quality when printing stuff that truely has a limited life and no one else will see? Okay, last question...is a USB printer shutting down when I turn off my PC? Bad?Thanks,pawn

[PcworldJim]

gotta love printkey

[AlanAnderson]

Mr. Lasky's article was good for the most part but he have some inaccuracies. He says "There's no resuscitating a dried-up cartridge." but my years in printer service say different. Many a cartridge can be rescued by taking it out, flipping it so the printhead is up and dropping a drop of Windex on the printhead. Wipe it off with a paper towel and repeat again. Then install and do a test print. If not all jets are printing, repeat the process.He also says, "refilled cartridge will hold less ink than a new cartridge from the original manufacturer wil". I know that some OEM cartridges come with far less ink that they can hold and this is done purposely to sell more cartridges. In these cases a refilled cartridge will last much longer than the new one.

[normR]

http://www.pcworld.c...1&zoomIdx=1This link returns as"Cannot be found". Any help to see it? Thanks.

[normR]

OK, never mindmy previous post about the "Cannot be found". The picture has magically appeared. Does anyone refill their print cartridges with good results? Recommended refill kit? I use HP 5550 printer, and lots of printing. Thanks.

[rwbrussels]

Good article, but it misses a few of the key points for super cheap printing - having run small offices for years here are some common tricks for getting down towards $1 a cartridge.It's well known the printer manufacturers do not care at all about their printers - only about selling ink, so when you buy a printer, concentrate on lowering ink costs, since all ink jet printers give good results now anyway (when you pay more, you are typically paying for better paper handling or better printing speed, but seldom better print quality). Tips:1) Consider whether you need color printing at all, and if so, consider getting two very inexpensive printers, and using one for color only, and the other for B&W (text) only. Color printing a photograph costs about ten to fifty times what B&W printing costs, so consider sticking to B&W for everything except photographs. Always swap color cartridges in the color printer with re-manufactured or generic units, and always re-ink B&W yourself.2) Re-inking is your friend. When you read online that re-inking may throw out print balance and so forth, they are only talking about printing in color; for this reason, I only usually re-ink the black tanks, and print everything possible in B&W. And unlike with color, it does not matter at all what black ink you use, since deviations in print density will always be relatively slight in B&W. This means you can stick to re-inking kits and refills for unpopular/discounted printers, often kits to fill ten cartridges for $5. In B&W, it won't much matter. This means you can use ESPON GENERIC refill kits with your Canon printer, the other way around, and so forth. I have been doing this for ten years without incident. You can re-ink any ink jet printer with removable cartridges, though it is more reliably done with cheaper printers and sticking to black ink.3) Get a "chipper" if necessary. A chipper is a little bit of electronics that resets the ink tank chip on the bottom of Epson cartridges when you refill them and tell them that they are full again. If you re-ink a cartridge and the software tells you it is "empty or incompatible" you need a chipper. Other printer manufacturers may require chippers, too.4) Some secret knowledge but well documented: when you begin re-inking and doing a lot of B&W printing, you may exceed 10000 pages on your printer, and it may mysteriously shut down leaving you staring at blinking lights. This is a common trick to get you take your printer in for service (Epson, I am looking in your direction) and resetting, or, more likely, to frustrate you into buying a new printer for no reason. Download a software program like SSC (search for SSC EPSON Utility on the webl) which allows you to do this "essential service" at home by clicking a button to clear all page counters that the printer holds internally. Do the printer companies really make their printers shut down after a certain number of pages to get you to buy a new printer? Oh yes. They do. (Some will claim the printers shut down to avoid the ink cleaning pads from overflowing, but broadly, IMHO, this is bullocks.)5) GO THE OTHER WAY AROUND WHEN BUYING A PRINTER. If you do not want to mess with re-inking, shop around the clearance bins until you find the cartridges super cheap and in bulk for printers that are no longer commonly carried (often down to $0.30 a cartridge), buy up 30 or 40 of them, and then find the printer that matches them cheaply online. Since discounted/remaindered cartridges tend to be for older models, the printers themselves can often be found super cheap on eBay or Amazon, sometimes for $10 or so. 6) Under M$ operating systems, go into START -> CONTROL PANEL -> PRINTERS and then PROPERTIES for your default printer, and select B&W only and DRAFT/FAST PRINTING and "2 UP" or "4 UP" (pages per sheet) to double or triple (or more) your printing output per cartridge.A note about shutting down inkjets; when you shut them down normally, they often will park the print heads to keep them from drying out. Shutting down your computer does not shut down the printer - push the power button on the printer itself if you will not be printing for more than a day or two. Using these tricks I have gotten 20,000+ pages out of each in a battery of Epson C44UX - spending only about $40 in ink all told (of course that was 99% B&W printing :-)Good luck...

[Omee6]

Purchase the printer that is the most economical in using ink. The initial cost may be more but it saves in the long run. I like HP Officejets for large ink cartridges and duplex printing. I set the printer default to gray scale and draft. It seems to me that printers are judged mainly by their speed and the quality of photos they produce. Photos that I print are fine on just about any printer today. I don't need card readers on my printer since I edit on the computer. I usually print photos at WalMart anyway. I don't need excessive speed either. I find it annoying that printer software warns me that I am running out of ink when I still have lots of ink left. As a novice I disposed of perfectly good ink cartridges and replaced them far sooner than needed. I would like to be able to set the level at which I am warned that ink is low.

[SQUIRE]

Mr. Lasky has some good tips on saving ink while printing, however, I have to disagree with him on refilling your own ink cartridges. For the past two years I have been using the Dataproducts brand "INK STATION REFILL SYSTEM," this system is without mess, and is very easy to use. As far as quantity of ink added to the cartridge when refilling, I measure the cartridge weight each time I refill, using a gram scale, the weight equals or sometimes exceeds the OEM product. Photo fade? I have printed photos using both OEM and the Ink Station Refill System, and haven't noticed any difference, some of the photos are at least three years old. Now the part I like best, I HAVE BEEN, AND WILL CONTINUE TO SAVE MONEY. THANKS FOR LETTING ME GET MY TWO CENTS WORTH IN.SQUIRE

[teflach]

The "Snipping Tool" with Vista allows you to Snip only the section of a web page you wish to save. Saves printing unwanted text, pictures, and ads.

[cleanwake]

For those who have printers with built in print heads as opposed to those who have the printhead in the cartridge, I have one major suggestion and that is to do away with your print cartridges, and use an ink system instead.

An ink system uses a tank for each color and from the tank via small tubes it feeds ink to a never ending cartridge. Once connected it allows for printing about 8,000 sheets of paper on one refill. I can buy 1 pint of black ink and a half pint of the three colored inks for the price of one set of OEM cartridges that are good for 500 sheets. I pint of black refills my tank at least 10 times which is equal to using 16 cartons of 10 reams of paper.

I do give the print heads a cleaning every month and I manually shut it down so that I give it the regular startup every day. The one thing I do not use my printer for is to print glossy photos, so I can make no claims as to how the ink I buy in bulk performs. The one thing that I do not worry about is running out of ink during a print job of many collated sets. If I had to print photos all the time I'd buy a printer that is dedicated to that one task.

[Vaati76]

pawn, on 28 March 2007 - 10:33 PM, said:

Why not use the printer option to print multiple pages on one sheet instead of spending $50 for "Fine Print" or just use the printer's black and white option if you don't want color. Let me know which printers can't do that and I won't buy one. Of course my printer was free so I don't like buying them. Why not use the lowest print quality when printing stuff that truely has a limited life and no one else will see? Okay, last question...is a USB printer shutting down when I turn off my PC? Bad?Thanks,pawn

I can answer your last question. About if your usb printer shuts down when your computer shuts down and thats a NO. Your printer still has a power cord going to an outlet so it will still be on if your computer is off.