The aim of this paper is to describe an efficient strategy for descritizing ill-posed linear operator equations of the first kind: we consider Tikhonov-Phillips-regularization χ^δ α = (a * a + α I)^-1 A * y ^δ with a finite dimensional approximation A n instead of A. We propose a sparse matrix structure which still leads to optimal convergences rates but requires substantially less scalar products for computing A n compared with standard methods.