Laser printers are the printer of choice for many home and business computer users. Once upon a time laser printers used to cost a small fortune to buy, but these days you can buy a brand new monochrome laser printer from as little as £50!
For people that want high quality printouts in monochrome, they are an excellent and cost-effective way to do so – and sometimes they are even cheaper to run on an ongoing basis than inkjet printers!
Personally, I have an all-in-one monochrome laser printer that has scanning and faxing capabilities built into it, and it’s a device I use both for home and business purposes. It’s helped me immensely, and in the three or so years that I have owned it, I’ve not had any issues with it apart from needing to purchase some new toner cartridges for it every so often.
I would probably consider myself as a light printer user, but there are obviously going to be people that need to print volumes of stuff out on a regular basis. For those individuals and businesses, running a laser printer can turn into an expensive business. New toner cartridges cost anything from £45 upwards, and then there is the expensive drum units which also have to be replaced (although not as frequently as toner cartridges).
In an age where many people and businesses in the United Kingdom are looking for ways to cut their costs and expenses, running a high-volume laser printer can be quite expensive indeed.
If you are one of those laser printer-owning folks that ends up paying a fortune to keep their office peripheral going, there are some steps you can take to reduce your printer expenses:
Print on both sides of your paper
Another printer-related cost is paper. The majority of people in Britain tend to print out one-sided documents and images, which is obviously a waste of paper. There are many laser printers on the market that offer full duplex printing capabilities (i.e. they can print on both sides of the same piece of paper).
You should consider investing in such a laser printer if you don’t own one already, and ensure that you make good use of full duplex printing.
Use print preview in your applications
People often waste toner and paper by printing stuff out which doesn’t fit onto pages properly, or say the last page of a document printed from an email or the World Wide Web is just footer text that you don’t need.
Before you hit that print button, make sure you preview what you are about to print out so that you can see how many pages you need to print out, and then you can select which pages you don’t want to print out.
Use draft mode where possible
Sometimes known as standard mode or low-quality mode, you should select this option for printouts that don’t need to have the best quality (such as printouts from the Web or meeting notes). This helps you to reduce the amount of toner needed to print such documents out.
