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August 14, 2006

How to reduce printing costs and hassles

Stop wasting ink (and money) today

Rosemary Haworth

Printers look for colour in a page and will use black ink if they can't find it. If colour is present, some printers won't use black - they'll print black areas by overprinting colour inks. To force your printer into generating a true black print, select Greyscale or Black from the printer's driver.

Step 1

Draft mode places less ink or toner on the page. This makes text and pictures less readable, but pages will print faster and you'll save money because you don't have to replenish the ink so often. You'll find a draft mode option in your Print driver or under Options when you press Print.

Step 2

Most printers can overlay a watermark or print it underneath the main content. These features are typically used for company logos or ‘Confidential' branding. Printers that support these features have one or two tabs in their drivers devoted to them, where you can enter wording and save custom designs.

Step 3

Sometimes a print job gets ‘stuck' and you'll need to clear it from the printer's queue. Click on the printer icon in the task bar to view the queue. Right-click on the print job that's stuck - it usually has an error message against it - and select Cancel. This clears the job and lets the printer get on with other tasks.