Cartridge World Newsletter

Recycle, Refill, Reuse

October 2007

Featured Stories

Share a printer...

The true cost of ink...

Plugging in a fax...

Lower the cost of printing...

Store Info

3952-H Clairemont Mesa Blvd.
San Diego, CA 92117

Mon-Fri 9am-7pm
Sat 10am-2pm

(P) 858-581-9191
(F) 858-581-9128

cwsandiego.com

Greetings!

We want to thank all of our customers who have recomended us to their coworkers, friends and families. The best advertising we get is the recommendation of a satisfied customer. We have some ideas for how to reward those of you who send us new customers. Keep an eye on our website (http://cwsandiego.com) for more information on this in the upcoming weeks.

As usual, we've scoured the web to bring you information on printing and printers that might be useful to you. We welcome requests and recomendations for future newsletters. Send an email tocwsandiego@cwsandiego.comwith your suggestions.

(Visit Lifehacker for more useful tips)

The true cost of ink

The price tag on any given printer really tells only half the story. Many times the cheapest printer for sale isn't necessarily the cheapest printer to own. And what's the most affordable printer for you in particular? Depending on how many pages you print and how much it costs to print each page, a high-priced printer with expensive cartridges could be a lot cheaper to own in the long run than a less-expensive printer with low-cost cartridges. Coming up with that long-run cost for comparison isn't always easy, but that is exactly what we did recently in PC Magazine Labs with some of the leading printers on the market. And the results were surprising.

Before you can calculate the real cost of a printer, you need to know the cost per page. To get it, you need two numbers for each cartridge: the yield (how many pages the cartridge can print) and the price. But until recently, there's been no good way to find out the yield.

Printer manufacturers will tell you the yield they've found and, usually, the estimated cost per page. But printing different images, manipulating driver settings, or changing how you determine that a cartridge has reached the end of its life can all alter the yield you come up with. Without knowing if different manufacturers' tests are comparable, you have to take the claims with a proverbial grain of salt.

What's been sorely needed is a standard for yield testing. The good news is that there finally is one-for documents at least. (The standard for photos is still under construction.)

In theory, yield claims based on the ISO/IEC standard should be fully comparable, regardless of the manufacturer. But there's always the possibility that different manufacturers have come up with different interpretations for how to run the tests, particularly with such a newly minted standard.

It's easy to read more into the yield numbers determined by the ISO/IEC standard than they actually mean. The first thing you need to know is that they don't represent a guaranteed number of pages you'll get from every individual cartridge-not even if you're printing only the set of pages defined by the standard. Basically, the stated yield is a statistical prediction that if you pick a cartridge at random and follow the procedures in the ISO/IEC standard, you'll get at least that number of pages more than 90 percent of the time.

To calculate the yield for what the ISO/IEC standard calls a primary cartridge-black or tricolor, for example-you start with the individual results from a minimum of nine cartridges. More precisely, you need results from a minimum of three sets of three cartridges tested on each of three printers, to take variations among both individual printers and cartridges into account. (The standard defines a different approach for what it calls supplementary cartridges, such as light cyan or light magenta, but for our purposes that's an unnecessary complication.)

You have to run the results through basic statistical formulas to determine what's called the "90 percent lower confidence bound." That number gets reported as the yield.

Knowing the cost per page for the printers you're considering lets you compare running costs, but it doesn't tell you which printer will be less expensive over its lifetime. For that, you have to calculate the total cost of printing, which means you have to make predictions about how much you'll print and how long you'll own the printer. If you know how much you print now, it shouldn't be hard to make reasonably accurate predictions, based on how many monochrome pages and how many color pages you currently print per month.

(Read more of this article...)

Plugging in a fax

PC Magazine

The fax feature in my HP Officejet 7410 works with the phone jack I initially plugged it into, but when I moved the printer to a different phone jack, it kept insisting the phone was off-hook. My temporary solution was to move the Officejet back to the original position, but I'd rather have it in the second location. Do you have any idea what the problem might be at the second jack and how to fix it?

Charles Nilsson

The most likely explanation is that you're using a standard telephone cable. The solution is to replace it with the one HP provided, or get a new one with the right cabling. Not so incidentally, the same issue can crop up with other AIOs designed for worldwide use, and it's caused by having to accommodate different phone systems.

The RJ-11 connector has six pins. In standard phone cables, the middle four-pins 2, 3, 4, and 5-are connected, with 3 on one side connected to 4 on the other, and 2 on one side connected to 5 on the other. In the U.S., a jack wired for one phone line will use pins 3 and 4. If there's a second line, it will use pins 2 and 5. The phone cable that comes with the 7410 for use in the U.S. uses only pins 3 and 4 on both sides. To accommodate European phone systems, the fax circuit inside the AIO needs to connect pins 3 and 4 to pins 2 and 5. If you use a standard four-wire cable on a two-line jack in the U.S., this shorts the phone lines and creates problems. The fix is to use a cable that connects only pins 3 and 4.

(Find more printer tips at PC Magazine)

Saving money on printing and paper

Dollar sign

An ink cartridge for that printer in your home or office is probably the most expensive component in your entire computing workflow.

To reduce the printing costs in your organization, the best solution is to educate your workforce - Do employees want to print a hard copy of that email message? Is it essential to distribute the PowerPoint training material in paper format when it's always available on the company's intranet?

That said, a paperless office is still a distant dream. There are always valid instances when we cannot do without printing a web page or a document on paper. And that's where we need to master a few simple things, outlined here, that can drastically reduce the overall printing cost (and even improve your bottom line).

First, if possible, switch to a Laser Printer. Generally, the entry price of an Inkjet printer is less than that of a Laser but you will definitely save in the long run because the cost of printing per page is lower in the case of Laser Printers. Other than the cost factor, the speed of printing documents and print quality are much better in Lasers.

Printing content from web pages and blogs is a big problem because most of online content is not optimized for printing and so you end up printing graphics, navigation bars, advertisements, footers and other stuff that serves no purpose other than wasting your precious ink and paper.

Thankfully, this problem can easily be solved with the new HP Smart Web Printing add-on for Internet Explorer that's absolutely free and lets you decide what content from the current web page is printed on to paper.

Here's how the HP Smart Print software works - you turn on the smart selection mode and the cursor on the webpage turns into a crosshair - you manually pick portions of the webpage that you would like to print and they are automatically added to the clip bin.

If you are in a hurry, the HP Smart add-on will automatically determine the best printing layout of the webpage that will use minimum amount of paper. And there are no surprises because the printed version will look exactly the same as what you see on the screen.

HP add-in is only for IE but Firefox browser fans may get the same functionality with Aardvark Extension. It's one of the easiest ways to remove (or hide) any object from a webpage including HTML tables, graphics or other elements that look good on the screen but not on paper. Start Aardvark, hover the mouse over webpage areas that you don't want to print and press E (erase).

FinePrint utility is recommended for people who have to print long documents. FinePrint allows you to print 2, 4 or 8 pages on a single sheet of paper. Larger pages can also be scaled so that they fit on standard paper sizes such as letter or A4. And since FinePrint is a print driver, it can be used with any application on your computer that can print, not just the web browser.

For Inkjet printer users, Ink Saver is a must have utility - it lets you control the amount of ink used by the printer, making your ink cartridges last longer.

GreenPrint is another commercial (but inexpensive) software that sits between your web browser and printer - it automatically analyzes each web page for waste material like sidebars, banner ad graphics, logos, and so on. They have also developed an environment friendly font called "EverGreen" that is designed such that 20% more words can fit on each printed page while the text still remains readable.

All Microsoft Office programs (like Excel, Word, etc.) provide some excellent printing options. Like for Microsoft Word, you can choose "Draft output" so the job gets printed quickly and you also save on ink/toner. You may also specify the page numbers (e.g.: 1,2, 6-8,12) that you want to print instead of printing the entire document.

In Excel, rather than printing the full spreadsheet, you can select the areas (or cells) with the mouse that you want to print and choose "Print Selection". You can also deselect the option to Print Gridlines to save some more ink. And in PowerPoint, always print the handout, not the slides. Use Grayscale or B&W mode rather than the default Color mode.

(Source)

We wish you and yours an enjoyable and fun-filled Halloween. We look forward to seeing you when it's time for your next cartridge. Be sure to ask about free delivery for qualified businesses. We are always trying to find more ways to serve you better.

Sincerely,

Joe McGrath

Cartridge World

Save 10%	Bring this coupon with you on your next visit, or give it to a friend. We'll give you an additional 10% off our already low prices when you purchase a refilled ink or toner cartridge.
Offer Expires: 10/31/2007