According to Consumer Reports and actually, just about everyone who uses it, there’s few things more annoying than the ultra-high price of printer ink (does anyone ever offer discounts on this product? Or printers that will accept off-brands?).

Here are four ideas that may ease the pain (somewhat):

• Print out only in black and white. For most items, you won’t need color anyway. Simply change the default settings to black and white (also known as grayscale) and forego the color cartridges.
• Consider the draft mode. If you rarely, if ever, use the printer for forms such as wedding invitations, business meeting reports,  important documents, or when the end result doesn’t need to be high quality official-looking, go for this particular setting. Not only does this use less ink; the machine will also print faster.
• Did you know that changing the font can save on ink? When Consumer Reports tested several fonts a few years ago, the results were 27 more mileage with Times New Roman than Arial (Calibri and Century Gothic also did better). Ecofont is designed especially for saving-it reduces enough printer ink from its characters to stay legible and save money (but a lifetime license for this font starts at $19.99).
• Each printer can vary in their ink usage; laser printers have a low cost-per-page (currently around 2 cents) and fast print speeds, but inkjets are not far behind (not speed-wise, though).  The Epson EcoTank printer line foregoes the ink cartridge for ink bottles and reservoirs (according to Epson, a set of Ecotank ink bottles are equal to about 20 standard ink cartridges).  instead. The bottles are $12.99 each; four will be needed. And the printers aren’t cheap-the Epson Expression ET-2550 alone will be $299. But the per-page printing cost is extremely small, at just $0.003. After three years, you’ll save a lot of money.

For more info, go to http://www.ConsumerReports.org.

Source: “5 ways to save on printer ink”-From Consumer Reports (Consumers Union Inc.)-The (Sunday) Vindicator, April 3, 2016