Want to Reduce Printing Costs? Choose The Font Type Carefully

If you are spending a good amount of money on print cartridges, be sure to read our guide on reducing printing costs of office documents for business.

Are you spending a fair amount of money on printing documents, emails and project reports? A recent study has revealed that choosing the correct font for printing documents can have a considerable impact on the overall printing costs of an organization.

Printer.com recently put this notion to the test using two popular printers. The Canon Pixma MP 210 was picked to simulate the printing of private users while the Brother HL-2140 laser printer was used to test business use. Both printers were left at their default settings (600 by 600 dpi). Changing only the font resulted in saving between $20 and $80 per year.

Here is a quick comparison between the different fonts and their business cost per year:

Example: The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has switched the default font for its emails from Arial to Century Gothic. The institution reported that the new font requires about 30% less ink, which costs up to $10,000 per gallon. (source)

The logic is simple enough. Different fonts requires different amounts of ink to print and you can save money on buying costly printer cartridges by making a simple change in the font type used to print the documents. In the above example, the university authority changed the font from Arial to Century Gothic and the yearly savings is expected to be somewhere around $5000 to $10,000.

Serif vs Sans Serif: Among the cost effective fonts, Century Gothic and Times New Roman are  the most economical followed by Calibri, Verdana, Arial and Sans Serif. Serif fonts have short horizontal lines at the top and bottom of characters and the characters are thinner. This is the reason why they consume less ink than “Sans Serif” fonts.

The Microsoft Philosophy: Microsoft has a good reason to prefer Calibri and Cambria over Times new Roman and Arial in their software applications such as Office 2007. According to Simon Daniels, program manager at Microsoft Corp – The more pleasing a font looks at the screen, the less tempted someone will be to print it. This will save both ink and paper.

What a thought !