Quit Wasting Ink: Shake Your Printer Cartridge for Maximum Value

Many printer companies have followed the Gillette model of giving away the razor and selling the blades at an inflated price. It's not uncommon to see a basic printer being sold for $60 or $70 and then have the ink cartridges be sold for $25 or $30 a piece. Of course there are some simple ways to get your printer ink for a cheaper price, such as buying it online or refilling your existing cartridge. There's an even better way to save money on your printer ink, instead of trying to buy cheaper ink, simply make sure you're using all of the ink that's in your existing printer cartridge.

Many consumer level printers will give you a notice that your printer cartridge is empty when 60% of the ink is still left in the cartridge. If you go out, buy a new cartridge and toss the old one at this point, you're wasting more than half of the ink that you paid for. Instead of tossing the cartridge, pull it out of the printer and give it a good shake. Chances are you'll get several weeks of additional use out of the cartridge before it actually does run out of ink.

Printer manufacturers have a very clear financial incentive to make sure that you don't use all of your printer ink, so any messages that you receive from their software about your ink levels should be taken with a grain of salt. Printer companies make much more profit on the price of the ink compared to the actual printers, so it makes sense that they'll want you to think you're running out of ink so that you go out and buy more cartridges.

There are plenty of other great ways to save printer ink and the price you pay for it. Get printer refill kits and refill your cartridges three or four times until the cartridge finally becomes warn out and unusable. Usually you'll be able to get a refill kit for your printer for about $10, or 1/3^rd of the price of a new cartridge.

You can also refill color cartridges too. Most of the time there's always one of the three or four colors which will run out before the rest of them, causing you to waste a lot of un-necessary ink. Usually you can get refill kits which will enable you to refill that color so the rest of the ink doesn't go to waste.

You might also consider purchasing a printer with a toner saver button. Samsung is one of a couple of companies that are equipping their printers with a feature that will reduce the amount of ink you use per page by about 40%. Over a period of time, that can be a significant amount of savings.