Ability Ink Saver review

Inkjet ink is very expensive, so printing a lot of pages means it can cost a fortune every year. Using your printer's draft mode is one way to save money, but the quality is often shocking and the settings difficult to access.

Ability's Ink Saver attempts to save you ink and money without reducing the quality of your prints. It sits between your computer and printer, examines print jobs and optimises them to use less ink, rather than reducing the output resolution, which is how draft modes work.

To get the best from the software, it's a good idea to set your printer's software to its best-quality settings and then adjust the amount of ink used via the Ink Saver interface. This is because the ink saving makes the output barely legible if your printer is set to draft mode.

The software is very simple to use. You just have to pick the ink-saving percentage for black and coloured inks. It will probably take a few attempts to optimise the output for your printer and your personal preference.

We tested Ink Saver using an HP DeskJet 980 and even at 50 per cent ink-saving setting, output was clear and bright and text legible. In general, the saving tends to lighten the output, so that black text is closer to grey. That said, when it was set to five per cent we found it hard to tell the difference between this and normal output.

The results are more noticeable on photographs, where you want accurate colour reproduction. If you intend to print your own photographs on photographic paper, we'd recommend turning this software off. If you're printing graphs and web pages on standard paper, the results are more than acceptable.

It might not be to everyone's taste, but if you're printing a lot of documents for personal use where top quality isn't an issue, this software should pay for itself in a year.

Author: Ursula Seymour