The simple trick to reduce your school printer ink use by 20%
At EcoPrinters HQ, we’re always researching ways to make school printing more affordable. Today we’ve got a great trick to share with you.
In our previous article, we explored how understanding page coverage (how much ink is used per page printed) can give you a greater insight into how you can increase your print savings.
Working with more than 100 schools, we understand that changing ‘what’ you print isn’t an option, but what if you could tweak ‘how’ you print it, and would this make a difference to school printer ink usage?
How fonts use different amounts of ink
It might surprise you that different fonts use different amounts of ink, even when printing the same sentence.
We devised a test to see just how well popular fonts perform, and whether we could make your school printer ink go further. We created a half-page A4 document (360 words), repeating the sentence “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog,” and tested the page coverage for a variety of fonts ( at size 11 and 12).
The fonts we tested were:
- Arial and Times New Roman, two of the most popular fonts for letter writing
- Comic Sans because it’s widely used by teachers / in schools.
- Tahoma as an alternative to Arial or Times New Roman (and because we use it at EcoPrinters).
Last Place: Comic Sans
Comic Sans was the most ‘ink intensive’ font of the 4 we tested, coming in at 24 lines when printing at size 12.
Size 11: 21 lines
Size 12: 24 lines
Third Place: Tamaho
Switching the same text to Tamaho reduced the ink usage by 7% when printing at size 12.
Size 11: 20.5 lines
Size 12: 22.5 lines
Second Place: Arial
The ever popular Arial font was even more efficient, reducing ink usage by a further 2% against Tamaho.
Size 11: 20 lines
Size 12: 21.5 lines
The Winner: Times New Roman
The winner, by a clear margin, was Times New Roman, printing the same block of text at just slightly over 20 lines, making it by far the most ink efficient. At size 12, printing in Times New Roman will make your ink go 5% further than using Arial, 10% further than Tamaho, and a whopping 20% than Comic Sans.
Size 11: 18 lines
Size 12: 20.5 lines
Time to switch from Comic Sans?
Comic Sans font is a hugely popular font in schools but it might be time for a rethink. Due to the design of this font, it requires more ink to print than any other font we tested, and specifically, 20% more ink than if you were to switch to Times New Roman.
It might feel like we’re stuck in the minutiae looking at the ink usage of different fonts but these small differences add up. The average UK secondary school prints more than 1 million pages every year, which equates to more than 300 high capacity black ink toner cartridges (HP131 toner). At £150 per toner, that’s a total of £45,000 just on replacement toners every year. Switching from Comic Sans to Times New Roman font could reduce your spend by 20% which is £9,000 per year!
Time to switch up your school printer solution?
We wouldn’t envy anyone trying to get all of their teachers to stop using Comic Sans, so if you’d prefer to save your school a lot of money on your printing solution without facing the wrath of teachers we’ve got just the solution.
There are alot of important things to get done in the school day, and keeping an eye on printing ink usage is not one of them so we’ve created an unlimited printing solution just for schools.
At EcoPrinters we’ve developed a unique ink recycling solution which means we can give you unlimited, full colour printing for an annual fixed price. More than 100 schools now use us and 95% tell us we’ve saved them a significant amount of money!
To find out if EcoPrinters can work for your school, get in touch on enquiries@ecoprinters.net, or request a call back using the chat bot in the bottom right. We’ll give you a quote for unlimited, full colour printing in less than 15 minutes.
