Ever since the conventional home printer hit the market back in the day consumers have had a problem from day one... The cost of ink, paper and maintenance!

In some cases the cost of consumables can exceed the purchase price of your new printer and/or computer depending the brand you purchase.

Think of a printer like a car, it will always need petrol to operate and with out it, its useless... A basic analogy but to the point.

Here are my top six tips to effective printing!

1. When purchasing a printer, look at brands/models that are compatible with refillable cartridges, this will save you a lot of money as refilling cartridges is normally a third of the price of a brand new cartridge.

2. Some printers take 2 cartridges (colour and black), other printers have multiple cartridges (black, yellow, cyan, magenta etc).
You will get more prints per page with a printer that uses multiple cartridges as the amount of ink is greater.

3. Learn how to use your printer more effectively to save on paper. Before printing, choose "print preview" to check if one line is going to cause another whole page to print.

Don't just blindly hit OK when the print dialogue box pops up. See if you can reduce the print range to the pages you need. If you really only need to pages 2 and 3, don't print 1 and 4 too. You can also highlight only the text you need and choose "print selection." This is particularly useful when printing from websites because you can eliminated the ads.

4. Adjust your margins. Use wider margins, smaller font and closer line spacing to get more to a page. Along these same lines, one tip for saving on printer ink cartridges is to use the "draft" quality setting or gray scale when printing.

5. Use Eco-font or Century Gothic font. These two types are said to be most economical while retaining best readability. Century Gothic is a thin, sans serif type that uses less ink by its nature. However, the font is wider and may use up more space than Arial or Times New Roman. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay uses Century  Gothic as default font for the bulk of its printing needs in all departments.

6. You can cut down on media costs by printing a few pictures onto one large photo sheet. For example, instead of four separate 4R (4 x 6-inch) prints, they can all be printed on one A4 sheet, and later cut with scissors. (Many printer manufacturers now bundle software printing applications that let you do that easily.)