Preton Ink Saver software for efficient printing

Ink saver software is designed to cut users' printing costs by reducing the amount of ink they use when printing. Preton's website points out that this is already possible on many printers by selecting Draft or other low-quality modes before sending the job to the printer.

However, Preton reckons that its software does a better job of reducing ink without reducing quality than the printer's built-in draft mode. If you are not using it for business purposes it's a free download (prices for businesses are available from the website).

Installation was quite simple and quick, and afterwards a small red 'P' icon appeared in our test computer's Notification Area. Double-clicking this brings up the Settings box, from which you can select the overall level of saving to try for. The higher this is set, the lower the print quality will be.

Cleverly, you can set individual levels for text, graphics (such as charts) and images (photos), so a report can be printed with decent-looking charts but lower text quality, for instance.

In normal use the software intercepts every document sent to the printer and displays a dialogue box requesting how much to save. You can choose from zero (the document will be printed normally) to 70 per cent, which it describes as Draft, or cancel the job entirely. You can turn this pop-up off and have a default saving level (or no saving at all) if you prefer.

It uses a technology called Pixel Optimizer. This calculates which parts of the text characters, graphics or images can be safely removed without reducing quality. In our tests there was a definite decline in quality as the slider increased: at 20 per cent it was perfectly readable, at 50 per cent it started to get hard to read and at the full 70 per cent it was very faint and largely unusable.

The program calculates reports on how much money you are saving, though we were sceptical of its figures. You can see that it's using less ink, though, so there is definitely a saving to be made. Given that it's free it's easy to download and tweak until you get a saving level with which you are happy.