Money is tight for a lot of people right now, and discovering you have run out of ink and will need to pay for a new cartridge could just be a step too far. If you want to get the very most out of your cartridges and ensure your printing costs are reduced then there are a few tricks you can do. This article provides everything you need to know if you want to save money on your ongoing printer costs.

First and foremost you need to print only when absolutely necessary. Time and time again people print their emails and there is rarely any reason to. An email can be forwarded to those who need to see and if necessary you can always note down with paper and pen any details you want to keep with you from an email. Nine times out of ten an email that gets printed doesn't need to have been. Before printing anything, take a moment to consider whether you really need to or not and what would happen if you didn't print. If you do this from today you will soon see a reduction on how much you are printing.

It is also vital that you don't print from websites too. Websites are not usually designed to be printed and so when you print a site you will often get pages and pages with the odd advert here or bit of text there. Not only does this waste the ink but it is a waste of paper too. Web links can be sent by email if you want to show someone something, and again a paper and pen can be used to take the information you need if absolutely necessary. The other problem with printing from websites is that the amount of coloured ink it uses will soon see stocks run out. There are always banners, adverts and a host of coloured boxes with text that all get printed alongside the small amount of text you actually want. This can make your coloured ink run out in no time at all.

If you want to really keep costs down then you should turn off your coloured ink printing cartridge altogether. This is not always possible, but if you can choose to print only in black and white. It is always much cheaper to print only in black and white than it is in coloured because black ink is cheaper than coloured. Another good tip is to set the settings to draft mode. This means that the quality of the printing will not be the absolute highest, but less ink will be used. To the untrained eye the quality looks the same anyway and for the majority of things you are printing it is unlikely that you need something of the very highest quality. If you are printing important documents for work then you can change the settings back to normal, but otherwise just keep them on draft mode.

You can find much cheaper cartridges and printer ink online too. Rather than visiting your local computer shop to buy your cartridges you should go online. Here you will benefit from more choice, lower prices and delivery straight to your door. If you order in bulk sometimes there are even further savings to be made and free delivery too.

There you have a thorough list of ways you can keep your printing costs down. One word of warning however is that if you print very infrequently it is possible the ink in the cartridge will dry up. To ensure this doesn't happen every month just print one quick page with a little text on it. This won't waste much ink and will ensure the cartridge stays in good working order. Buying printer cartridges and ink can be expensive but if you follow this advice you will minimise the cost involved. Don't forget to buy your lexmark printer ink or epson printer cartridges online for the lowest prices.