Article: Ink Saving Tips - Saving Ink With An Inkjet Printer

By Jill Costello, 20th June 2005. Copyright The Scrap Witch. No part of this article may be reproduced or otherwise used without prior written permission.

Those of us who own an inkjet printer will know how expensive they can be to run. I have an Epson inkjet printer which takes two ink cartridges one for black ink, the other for coloured ink. For my printer, the ink cartridges cost approximately A$32 for the colour cartridge and A$38 for the black. Quite an expensive exercise, considering that I seem to be replacing them at least every two months. This got me thinking about how to get the most out of my ink cartridges to reduce the costs of running my printer. I came up with the following methods of saving ink.

• Optimizing Your Print Settings
• Ink Saving Software

Optimizing Your Print Settings

This may be obvious to some, but how many of you simply save your document and then hit "print" without thinking twice about it? Come on, admit it! If you own an inkjet printer and you’re doing this, then you’re probably wasting a whole lot of ink! Here's a few simple ways to save printer ink:

• Printer Initialization - Try not to turn your printer off and on repeatedly. Your printer actually uses up a small amount of ink every time it initializes itself (ie turns on). If you are having a problem getting a document to print, try to solve it at the computer end of things first. Many people rely on switching the printer on and off to solve the simplest of problems. Sometimes it’s not actually the poor printer’s fault at all - and more importantly it’s a waste of ink!
• Draft vs. Best Quality - Think about the quality needed for each document before you go ahead print it. If you’re printing some information for yourself off the internet or perhaps printing a colouring book page for the kids, you don’t need to use highest quality setting. Draft quality is usually more than adequate for these types of print jobs. More important documents such as professional letters or school reports can often be printed at a "medium" quality setting with no significant loss of quality. Try it and see if you can tell the difference. I bet you can’t! Reserve the very "best" setting on your printer for documents where quality is important . At home these might be your photos and at work they might be your product catalogues, proposals and presentations.

• Black Only Mode - Most inkjet printers take two types of cartridges - black and colour. If you’re printing out a black and white document, change the printing mode to black only. For example, with an Epson Inkjet printer, go to "Print Properties > Ink > Black". Believe it or not, if you leave your printer in colour mode, you are using actually up the ink in your colour cartridge - even if you only have black in your document! Believe me, I used up several colour cartridges without ever printing a single colour document before I realized this! Now I print all documents (except my photos of course) in black only mode at either draft or medium quality. My colour ink cartridges now last twice as long as they did before.

Ink Saving Software (InkSaver 2.0)

Although I do practice what I preach, I still find that I am using my inkjet cartridges quicker than I would like. Naturally, when I recently discovered a piece of software that claimed it could save the amount of ink used by my inkjet printer, I was intrigued.

So how does it work? The software supposedly sits between your print driver and your printer. When you set a document off to print, the software intercepts the document and reorganizes the data in order to optimize the ink usage requirements. It then passes the print job over to your printer for output. Sounds great in theory - but does it actually work in practice? I decided to test it out for myself.

The trial version of InkSaver 2.0 is available from the InkSaver Website. The trial period is 15 days and the download is 4.1mb.

Minimum system requirements are stated to be:

• Windows 2000, XP Home or XP Professional
• 20mb of hard disk space
• 64mb RAM (128 recommended)
• HP, Epson, Canon and Lexmark inkjet printers (Parallel, USB and TCP/IP printing is supported. Sadly, wide format printers ie A3 or tabloid sized printers, are not supported.)

Download and extract the zip file. Run the resulting .exe file to start the installation process. During installation you will be asked to select a printer. In my case, the software brought my the name of my printer up automatically, so I all I had to do was select it. Next, you are directed to print a sample page, so you need to have your printer turned on and ready to go. The sample page printed like this on my Epson photo printer (see above left). There are a number of ink saving options on the page (from 0% up to 75%) with sample results alongside.

At the end of the installation process, a configuration window appears (see right). The ink saving options are presented here on a sliding scale. Move the slider up or down or type in a percentage at the bottom of the scale. I chose the 40% savings level which seemed to be a reaasonable print quality for my purpose (printing invoices). An approximate dollar value saving per cartridge is shown alongside the scale. Since the software is American, one assumes this approximation is in USD. It's probably not very useful for us here in Australia.

To the bottom right of the configuration window, under "Printer Settings", there is checkbox option enabling you to choose the level of ink savings on a per document basis.

Other Resources:

• About The Craft Robo
• Setting Up The Craft Robo
• Setting Up A Robo Master File
• Making Craft Robo Stand-Off Rings
• Comparing Craft Robo & Craft Robo II
• Personal Die Cutting Machines
• Cricut Vs Craft Robo
• Xyron Vs Cricut
• Digital Scrapbooking Page Size
• Printing Digital Photos
• Galerie Photo Paper Review
• Ink Saving Tips

 

 

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