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<\/p>\nPrinting can be very expensive, and it can also have a huge negative impact on the environment as paper manufacturing contributes to deforestation, air pollution, water pollution, and even global warming. If you are sick of constantly buying expensive ink cartridges or laser toners to print documents and pictures using your Mac, there\u2019s a lot you can do to cut down on your printing costs without making any major sacrifices in terms of convenience.<\/p>\n
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To spend less money per printed page, you need to develop healthy printing habits. Your Mac computer allows you to control the printing process to a very fine degree, and learning which print settings use less ink without dramatically affecting the quality of the printed documents and images is the key to economic printing.<\/p>\n
On all Mac computers, you can access the print settings directly from the print dialog window. You can either open the print dialog window from the menu bar or do the same using the Command-P shortcut. If a printer is connected to your Mac computer, you should see it available next to the Printer option. Select the available printer and click on the Show Details button to expand the print dialog window. This will show more options, allowing you to change the orientation of the printed document or picture, select a different print quality, or print using only the black ink cartridge.<\/p>\n
Printers come in various sizes, offering a wide choice of print technologies. Some printers are designed for non-stop, high-speed printing, while other printers are designed for home users who print everything from documents to pictures, usually in small quantities.<\/p>\n
You might be tempted to buy the best printer you can afford, but you need to realize that the most expensive printer in your local electronics store might not be the best choice for you. High-speed, high-volume printers are often cost-effective only when you print in very large quantities. Yes, the cost per page will be smaller, but that\u2019s largely irrelevant if it takes five years of frequent printing just to offset the higher price of the printer when compared to a cheap toner-based printer.<\/p>\n
Carefully consider what you plan on printing and how often you\u2019ll likely use your printer. Select a few printers that meet your needs and compare their cost per page. Finally, go online and read user reviews to find out how satisfied people are with each printer to determine which one is the best.<\/p>\n
Even though the print button is often just a click away, you should resist it as much as you can. These days, you have so many other options how to share documents than printing them on paper that it would be a shame not to take advantage of them. Instead of printing that company memo and giving it to each employee, why not upload it to the cloud and send everyone a link or a push notification, instead?<\/p>\n
Unless you need to print something urgently, consider placing documents for printing into a special folder and leaving them there for a while. When you open the folder after a few hours, you may be surprised by how many documents that you\u2019ll find in there you no longer need.<\/p>\n
You should establish the habit of using the print preview feature before clicking on the print button. It takes just one wrong setting to mess up the entire print job, leaving you without any other option except for printing everything all over again. This is especially common when employees share a single printer, but it also happens often to families who print from a single computer.<\/p>\n
Although it\u2019s possible to interrupt the print job, one must first notice that something is wrong to do something about it. The print preview feature shows you on the computer screen how everything will look on paper, giving you a chance to make last-minute adjustments and avoid a costly mistake.<\/p>\n
By default, macOS uses the standard print quality settings, which offer a good compromise between quality and cost. But if you print mostly text, you may not notice any significant difference even if you lower the print quality settings as low as you can. This is something you really need to experiment with because every printer is different, and so is every print job. You definitely don\u2019t want to lower the print quality settings when printing pictures that you want to frame and hang on your walls at home because they would lose contrast and look very bland.<\/p>\n
Mac computers make it easy to print in black and white. Black ink cartridges are usually less expensive than color ink cartridges, so it makes sense to print everything that absolutely doesn\u2019t have to be printed in color in black and white.<\/p>\n
![\"Print](\"\/help\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Apple_iPad_monochrome.jpg\")
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