These days, as small businesses and offices continue to cut expenses wherever they can, the print and copyroom sometimes seems like it has become an unbearable expense. Some usual strategies include double-sided printing and keycodes to use the printer. Others try more drastic approaches, like trying to impose a paper free office, or giving every employee a flash drive to carry files. Here’s a much simpler solution: change your font and save up to 31% on ink costs. Wow, really??

The most popular font type these days is Arial. A study conducted by blog.printer.com, however, deduces that it’s certainly not the most economical. 10 fonts were used, printing the same text each time in a strict control. The printing habits of both private and business users were simulated, with a Canon Pixma MP210 used for home users and the Brother HL-2140 for business users.

Identical pages were printed in all 10 fonts. The documents were turned into .pdf documents and scanned by the application Apfill, which calculated the total ink coverage of each page.

To establish a winner, each font’s relative ink coverage was evaluated and compared. This reduction is ink usage translates into roughly a $20 savings per year for an average home user printing 25 pages/week versus using Arial. A business user printing around 250 pages a week would actually save as much as $80 in a year.

Keep in mind, many businesses have more than one printer, or print far more than 250 pages/week. For these businesses, the savings could be astronomical.

Now we need to now, which font is the thriftiest?? What text utilized the least ink while maintaining quality readability?

That #1 font is Century Gothic, ladies and gentleman. Verdana and Times New Roman, other popular and common fonts, placed at #5 and #3, respectively. Arial itself was ranked #6 in the list of 10 fonts tested for ink usage.

Perhaps this is a method that would work in your company or small business to lower costs. Just change the font.

Check out the rest of the blog.printer.com article on their website, where you can see numbers and rankings for all ten of the tested fonts.

Try inkcartridges.com for great deals on cheap ink cartridges.

 

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Computer Hardware & Accessories