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Mini-Review of Ink$aver (Money$aver)

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patteo:
Basic Info

What is Inksaver ? - That sounds like a silly question. It saves Ink or in other words Money because Inkjet Ink not only cost two arms and two legs, but is more expensive than vintage wine and oil at more than US$2000 a gallon.

And your Gosh it's cheap Guzzlejet (I mean Inkjet) printer is basically like a High powered SUV in that it is thirsty and drinks lots of it even when you don't step on the accelerator.

How do you fix the problem ?

In one word. Inksaver !

So if you want to save money, read on. And believe it or not, like Fineprint, (which also saves you Inkmoney https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=6519.0 )
and Print2Flash ( https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=7969.0 ),
Inksaver is unbelievably also another Work of Art and is almost idiot proof to use, and which I forgot about since it works wonderfully and so unobtrusively in the background.

App NameInksaver 2.0App URLwww.inksaver.comApp Version ReviewedVersion 2.0Test System SpecsToshiba Tecra Laptop 1.70Ghz 1GB Ram Windows XP SP2Supported OSesXP and probably earlier OSesSupport MethodsThere's an support email address although I got no response when I emailed them while writing this reviewUpgrade PolicyPolicy for upgrades not stated. But I did remember paying for an upgradeTrial Version Available?15 Day trial version of the app is available. Pricing SchemeUS$34.95 for Inksaver 2.0Author Donation LinkNot ApplicableReviewer Donation LinkDonate to patteo, the ReviewerScreencast Video URLSee animated gifs in this review belowRelationship btwn. Reviewer and Product I have no links with Inksaver other than as a reviewer and long time satisfied user

Intro:
It saves Ink, money that is whenever you print to your Inkjet printer.

SCREENSHOT OF INKSAVER INTERFACE
[attach=#1][/attach]


Who is this app designed for:
Any and every one who owns a thirsty Inkjet printer (and they are ALL thirsty) and don't own the bank or is not Warren Buffet or Bill Gates and would like to reduce the need to feed their printers with outrageously expensive ink cartridges.

And all this still maintaining good printout quality if you don't try to save too much ink.

At 25% to 30% savings, you will not notice degradation in the print quality because of the way Inksaver works, using an algorithm to place the spots on the paper.

Anyway, a bit of testing will help you determine which level of Inksaving is most appropriate for your purposes.

A replacement for Draft mode
Inksaver really comes it handy too if you are testing out a print job where you have to do lots of alignment to get it just right as you can set Inksaving to 75%. You really feel good seeing how much Ink you save in such situations.

No doubt one can save ink by using Draft mode for situations like that.

But you can also combine Draft and Inksaver to double the effect.

The Good

Inksaver installs very simply and stays unobtrusively out of sight until you print. It then pops up a screen to ask you to set the level of savings you wish to achieve.

But once you are satisfied, you can set a particular Inksaving level (say 25%) as the default, and it won't even ask you in future if you like to save some ink. It just quietly saves away.

It even allows you to print a sample page with the different Ink savings levels so you can choose what suits you.

It is so simple to use and save money right away, and you don't really need to read any long help files to achieve this.

Just install and off you go !

[attach=#2][/attach]

But if you must fiddle, it also has an Inksaving Savings Estimator settings page so that you can enter the approximate number of cartridges you use per year and the default savings level. This will translate immediately to the estimated $ Savings at each level of ink savings in the animated Gif you see above.

[attach=#3][/attach]

It does not affect the printer at all as I have used it for extended periods of time without any problems. The only real problem I have is what to do with the money I saved from needing to buy less ink.

The needs improvement section

Occassionally, you may face a situation where Inksaver, will during startup tell you it cannot find a printer and you may have to run the program to add it again.

Perhaps the program author could add the ability to save even greater than 75% say to 85%, for those times when all we want really is a faint outline for testing programs print output alignment. Then again, this may not be desirable for technical reasons. But as is at 75% is quite sufficient.

Besides that, there's really no hassles or other issues at all in using Inksaver.

The one big problem you will have of course is what to do with the money you saved !. One good idea is to Donate part of it to www.donationcoder.com

Why I think you should use this product

One reason really, that is to $ave Money, if you print that is to an Inkjet printer.

And if you got a couple of kids in school, and they have to print some nice looking projects, and they never seem to get it right and keep printing another version of their 30 pages powerpoint, it's really lots of Ink and money out the door - you got two more reasons to use Inksaver.

I have used Inksaver with Canon Printers mostly, but my understanding is that it works with practically all Inkjet printers.

How does it compare to similar apps

There are no other such application that I know of.

Conclusions

This is one cool money saving application that anyone can get for free (literally since it saves you money as you print). The more you print with inkjets, the faster you save.

And don't forget to donate some of your savings to www.donationcoder.com

I would give it a 5/5.

Links to other reviews of this application

http://www.itreviews.co.uk/software/s169.htm

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/userreviews/fid,22529/userreviews.html

http://www.inksaver.com/overview/reviews.html

mouser:
very nice minireview  :up: :up:

Grorgy:
What a great idea. thanks for the review  :Thmbsup:

patteo:
What a great idea. thanks for the review  :Thmbsup:
-Grorgy (May 24, 2007, 03:30 PM)
--- End quote ---

You are welcomed.

I'm a little curious as to whether anyone might be interested in getting a discount on Inksaver or there are lots of Bill Gates and Warren Buffets here on the forum who does not care that they are contributing to the huge ink cartridge profits of the inkjet manufacturers.

Inkjet ink is around US$2,000 per gallon vs US$3 per gallon for petrol (I think)

If there is, then it may be something that perhaps our donationcoder Discount Coordinator cthorpe can help in.

Anyone interested ?

Or perhaps not that many here actually print at all.

Darwin:
Thanks for the review patteo  :Thmbsup:. I've been using Inksaver for a couple of years now and have it installed on two machines. It's not quite so indispensable since I purchased a monochrome laser but still sees service whenever I need to print in colour (an infrequent occurence these days). Anyway, just wanted to reiterate that it does work, it does save money and it's seamless - once it's installed and configured, you forget that it's there.

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