Avanquest Print Saver Eco review

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.