Avanquest Print Saver Eco review

best buy

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Printer ink is expensive stuff. For example, a standard 9ml tank of PGI-525PGBK pigmented black ink for Canon’s Pixma MG5150 MFP costs around £10 if you buy it online. That’s £1.11 per millilitre. In comparison, a £160 1996 vintage bottle of Bollinger RD champagne works out at just 23p per millilitre and Chanel No5 Eau Premier perfume costs 68p per millilitre.

With that in mind, the appeal of saving a couple of precious millilitres is immediately obvious. Avanquest’s Print Saver Eco ink and toner saver is designed to do exactly that. Once installed, it works in the background to limit the amount of ink or toner your printer puts on the paper. Its simple interface lets you define how much ink you want to use, save ink usage profiles and even help you calculate your savings.

We tested Print Saver Eco using a Canon MG5150, our Budget Buy inkjet MFP. It uses five separate ink cartridges: cyan, magenta, yellow and dye-based black for photo printing and a separate pigment black ink for text printing. To get the clearest impression of what kind of ink savings Print Saver Eco can produce, we had to make sure we only used one of the cartridges. With this in mind, we printed a mono text document until the MG5150 reported it was out of ink.

A slider lets you adjust the amount of ink saved from 0% (i.e. your printer’s standard performance) up to 75%. The default is 25% and the results are impressive. The difference between our standard printed page and Print Saver Eco’s 25% saving mode was barely visible. If anything, the text processed by Print Saver Eco looked a little sharper.

A fresh pigmented black ink cartridge produced 300 copies of our document at the printer’s standard settings. Using Print Saver Eco’s default 25% ink saving mode we got 372 pages – almost exactly 25% more. Using the printer’s own draft mode (which is excellent on Canon printers), we got 592 pages. By comparison, Print Saver Eco gave us 652 pages at its 50% ink saving mode, and produced noticeably sharper and darker text than Canon’s own draft prints.

Compared to a draft print (top), Print Saver Eco’s 50% saving uses less ink but produces neater lettering

The quality and effectiveness of Print Saver Eco is even more visible on colour prints. Rather than becoming streaky or jagged, colours merely looked a little more faded, with no loss of image quality beyond that. You won’t want to use ink saving when you’re printing a photo or illustration to keep, but it’s great for colour maps, web pages and draft prints of graphs or slides. It’s worth leaving on permanently for text printing, where it lets you save money on ink with no easily visible impact on print quality.

The MG5150 has a great draft mode of its down, but Print Saver Eco will be of even more benefit if your printer produces satisfactory results at standard settings but is far too pale in draft mode. Regardless of what printer you use, Print Saver Eco is a great way to save money on its most expensive consumable, and will pay for itself quickly. It’s a Best Buy.