!44: Printing Costs - Does a Change in Font Lower Expenses?

!±8± Printing Costs - Does a Change in Font Lower Expenses?

These days, as small businesses and offices continue to cut expenses wherever they can, the print and copy room sometimes seems like it has become an unbearable expense. Some offices force their employees to double side their work or enter a passcode to use the printer. Other offices have gone into more drastic areas, implementing a paper-free office or equipping every employee with a portable USB drive. Here's a much simpler solution: change your font and save up to 31% on ink costs. Really now??

The Test

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. 10 fonts were used, printing the same text each time in a strict control. A Canon Pixma MP210 was used to represent the printer an average home user would own and the Brother HL-2140 was used to represent the printer an average business user would own.

All 10 fonts were used to print identical texts. The documents were turned into.pdf documents and scanned by the application Apfill, which calculated the total ink coverage of each page.

The Results

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 savings per year for an average home user printing 25 pages/week versus using Arial. Normal business use (estimated to be around 250 pages/week) would result in yearly savings with the switch to Century Gothic.

A huge savings could be achieved if the businesses have more than one printer, or printer more than 250 pages per week, of course.

So what is the winner of this font-off? Which text uses the least ink while maintaining a professional level of readability?

The Winner

That #1 font is Century Gothic, ladies and gentleman. 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.

Take a look at 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.

If you found this story as interesting as I did, please suggest it to a friend.