In today’s society, with increasing costs for printers, printer ink and paper, many offices and small businesses are willing to try anything to cut down on their printing costs. Some implement the usual office-wide strategies of double-sided printing and secure login codes 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. Really now??
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. To ensure a control, 10 fonts were compared, each one printing out the same text. The printer habits of both home users and business users were mimicked, with the Canon Pixma MP210 and the Brother HL-2140 as representative printers, respectively.
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.
The ink usage of each font was compared, and when the dust (and printers) settled, there was a clear winner. 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.
Finally we ask, which font is the winner?? Which font had the least page coverage while remaining acceptably readable?
And now, ladies and gentlemen, your #1 font is….Century Gothic!. Other popular fonts include Times New Roman listed at #3 and Verdana listed at #5. Arial placed #6 in the rankings out of the 10 fonts tested, suggesting that it isn’t terrible, but isn’t the greatest.
Now the next time you’re looking to cut ink and printing costs, try something simple: Try changing your 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 4inkjets.com for great deals on cheap ink cartridges.
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