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Sep 22

Written by: host
9/22/2009 7:00 AM  RssIcon

If you still use color inkjet or laser printers in your office, computer lab, home, or elsewhere, you undoubtedly know well that ink and toner costs eat up a huge chunk of your tech budget. There are, of course, simple and free solutions to reducing your ink/toner usage, such as printing in draft mode, previewing pages to print only those you really need, and setting your default to greyscale.

However, these solutions are not always perfect, and they are hard to enforce in a public setting like a church computer lab. That's when print software can be helpful. Here are several tools worth exploring...

  1. GreenPrint is a very powerful program that can help you reduce your printing costs by as much as 75 percent. It has some very slick features, such as giving you control over whether text and/or images print, and being able to create PDFs of your documents instead of printing them. It's available in 3 prices: a free ad-supported version, a $29 home and small business version, and an enterprise version for large companies. The software is available for both PCs and Macs, though only PC users can (currently, and according to the company for the foreseeable future) use the free version.
  2. If you're uncomfortable with putting ad-supported software on your lab computers, and you don't need a Mac version, then I'd recommend InkGard. InkGard costs $9.99 per year, also claims to save up to 75 percent of your printing costs, and it has fewer (yet still powerful) options that you can essentially "set and forget." Among the nice options is a PDF generator. They have a nifty calculator on their site that can help you estimate your annual savings. 
  3. For Mac users only, a company called MacEase offers several different programs which have various print-saving capabilities. EasyPrint, iPrint, PrintIt, and PrintMagic all have similar but slightly different features, so take a look and see which of them offers you exactly what you need. (The best deal at the moment is EasyPrint, which can be purchased along with 10 other great products for $49.95 at TheMacBundles.com.
  4. Still need even more suggestions? This article describes 3 additional options for those who really want to get serious about their ink or toner usage.

 ~ by Tim Gossett

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