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"  If your inkjet printer were a vending machine, you&amp;#039;d probably have to feed it at least a nickel for every page of black and white text, a quarter for every page of text with color, and fifty cents or more for every large photo. Ink isn&amp;#039;t cheap. In fact, by weight, the retail price of refill ink can equal that of silver (about $20 an ounce), and in some cases can be four times that amount. The resulting cost of printing a page varies widely but averages nearly $0.06, not counting the cost of the paper or the printer itself. And if you&amp;#039;re making significant use of color, you have to multiply the per-page cost by four. Long ago the printer vendors latched on to the famous Gillette razor-and-blades business model, where you handed out razors, hoping the owners would then buy replacement blades. Today you can get a perfectly good printer for less than $100, but refilling it with ink can cost more than the price of the printer, and you may have to refill it at frequent intervals. Refill ink is their cash cow. But things are not hopeless. Especially when shopping for a new unit, there are things you can do to reduce how much you feed the beast. Larry Jamieson, an analyst at the Photizo Group, a market research firm in Midway, Ky., suggests a few tips. Most importantly, think about not only the up-front price of printer, but also the cost of refilling the printer you buy, how much you&amp;#039;ll be printing, and what you&amp;#039;ll be printing. When a unit catches your eye, check what refill cartridge it uses, the retail price of that cartridge, and its expected yield. The handiest way to find such information is through the e-commerce sites of office-supply stores, such as Staples, Office Depot, or OfficeMax. Dividing the price by the expected yield will give you the pennies-per-page cost of printing, but the total yield may be as important. For example: A lot of refill cartridges for consumer printers have yields in the 400-page range. If you are printing 40 pages per week, you&amp;#039;d be using more than five cartridges per year. But it is very likely that there are other models available, even from the same vendor, with cartridges big enough to get you through the whole year. Those cartridges will cost more\u2014but not five times more. And the printer itself will cost more, but again, not five times more. Basically, a little homework up front can save you a lot down the road.  On the other hand, if you expect to print only a couple of pages per week, you may as well get a cheap unit with steep refill cartridges, because you won&amp;#039;t be running out of ink anytime. And if you finally do run out, don&amp;#039;t bother refilling the unit, Jamieson says\u2014just get a new printer. Remember, new ones come with ink. Lastly, though, you&amp;#039;ve got to consider what you&amp;#039;ll be printing, because those cartridge-yield numbers may need to be seriously modified for your situation.  All the major printer vendors base their cartridge-yield numbers on what&amp;#039;s called ISO 24711, which involves printing a standard suite of five canned documents over and over until the ink noticeably fades or the machine decides the cartridge is done. The suite consists of a business letter, a newsletter page with a modest amount of graphics, two pages of large color charts, and a color-registration page. Coverage (i.e., how much of the page is covered by ink) for each color averages 5 percent across the suite. If you are going to be printing 4 x 6 photos, that coverage for a given color can be 25 percent, and you&amp;#039;ll have to cut the yield estimate by a factor of 5. On the other hand, if you are outputting double-spaced manuscripts, then coverage will be about 4 percent, so you can increase the estimate by 20 percent. Think hard about how you intend to use your new printer. Other suggestions from Jamieson: \u2022 Printer vendors often offer high-yield cartridges that may cost 50 percent more but should yield two or three times more pages, making them worthwhile if you&amp;#039;re going to use a lot of ink. \u2022 Check your printer driver to see if there is a draft or economy mode, and try it. It may be good enough for most purposes and should cut ink consumption. \u2022 Another ink saver: When printing graphics, do not simply use the highest available resolution. It&amp;#039;s often overkill and can dramatically increase ink consumption.  \u2022 Look for printers with duplex modes (i.e., they can print on both sides of the paper). Printing on both sides will cut your use of paper and storage space. \u2022 Look for paper with the ColorLok logo, since it is engineered to work with inkjet printers. \u2022 Using used ink cartridges may save money, but quality varies widely. Finally, the market is changing. Jamieson notes that the vendors are gradually moving away from the razor-and-blades model, since the low-end buyers are either taking his advice and not refilling their printer or just uploading their pictures to the Web and not printing at all. The result is more emphasis on units with features of interest to serious buyers, including cartridges with lower per-page costs. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a9390/how-to-save-cash-on-pricey-printer-ink-15830703/>