How to Make Your Computer Use Much Less Ink

!±8± How to Make Your Computer Use Much Less Ink

We all know how insanely expensive ink cartridges are, even if you buy remanufactured or refurbished ink cartridges. Anyone that has ever owned a printer probably has come to dread that pop up message that gives a low ink warning, or dreads the day that they start to see the colors fading in the text or pictures that they are printing out. People dread this sort of thing because they know it is time to go out and spend another or so on a new ink cartridge.

Ink is probably the most expensive thing that you will ever have to buy on a regular basis when you own a PC (assuming that you print with it). While all of the other types of hardware, blank media (such as DVDs and CDs), and even computers themselves, are getting cheaper and cheaper every day, ink cartridges are still consistently expensive, and the price just never seems to get any better.

So how can you tweak a few settings on your PC and lower your ink consumption by about 80%, if not more? Well, it is all about how much quality you are willing to give up with your printing. But the good news is that you will barely even notice a difference in quality unless you are printing photos, and very graphic intensive web pages etc. So for how much ink you will save, it is almost always highly worth turning down your print quality a bit.

To lower the print quality of your printing, simply go into "control panel" and find your printer. Then right click on the icon of your printer, and click "properties", and then "printing preferences". Now, with most printers, you will see about 4 or 5 different quality levels, which should be something like: fast draft, fast, normal, fast normal, best, and possibly even max DPI. The "fast draft" setting will use the least ink, while "fast" is the next step up, followed by: fast normal, normal, best, and then max DPI.

If choose "fast draft" for the print quality, then you will literally burn about 80% less ink than you would with the "normal" quality selected. And on top of that, your printer will literally print about 5 times as fast too. The higher the quality you choose, the slower your printer will print, and the more ink you will burn. It really is as simple as that. Also, when printing text, you will not notice hardly any difference at all if you turn it to "fast draft" mode.

Lastly, if you don't mind printing in black and white, you can also turn the print quality to black and white only, which will save you from burning up tons of color ink. This is especially handy when printing out text documents, where normally it wont matter if they are printed in color or not. And keep in mind, if a document has anything other than PURE black for the text, then you will be wasting some of your color ink when you print it out, unless it is set to black and white only.