Product advertising gumph can often make pretty wild or nonsensical claims - such is the nature of the business. "Yes, your brain can be washed whiter than white with new Supernova Suds - please rush me a trial pack today, along with my free complementary ear flossing kit."

But here's the sell with this application. InkSaver... wait for it... saves your printer ink. Commendably straightforward, we think you'll agree. There is, of course, the obligatory product spiel on top of this basic premise, but unusually it does make some sense.

If you're anything like us, you might have purchased a budget inkjet priced on the cheerful side of sixty quid. However, over a few years it'll use up a great deal of cartridges, and at a fiver a throw (if you're lucky - many cost over £20) this can add up to a couple of hundred quid eventually. The theory behind InkSaver is that it increases the longevity of your cartridges and keeps matters very much within a budget frame of mind.

Of course it does this by tinkering with the amount of ink being used by the printer, so naturally there's a trade off in print quality. The million dollar question being, is it a workable one? Fortunately in this case the answer is yes.

InkSaver is certainly easy to use. The main menu is a simple options affair which allows you to tweak exactly how much ink you want to save in either black and white or colour settings. This can be as little as 5 percent or as much as 75 percent, and that's pretty much all there is to the operation of the program.

On our print tests the quality certainly dipped noticeably at around 50 percent ink savings; as you would expect it becomes a bit hazy, although black text still came out fairly well. However, at 20 percent the print quality loss was pretty slight all round.

And does it actually work? It would appear so. Although the results aren't quite as easy to observe as print quality, we ran the program on a PC in a retail shop which prints a lot of leaflets over a period of several weeks. A single cartridge lasted the entire innings on 50 percent savings, a considerable achievement which it had never managed before.

On the downside there are compatibility issues. If you don't have a common Canon, Epson or Hewlett Packard printer then you won't be able to use InkSaver (check the Web site for exact details here). You could also argue that printing in draft mode saves ink anyway, although Inksaver doesn't sacrifice print quality to the same extent.

InkSaver is a very solid application which really does work and will save you money in the long run, particularly if you're a heavy printer user. A final point worth mentioning is that there's a 15 day trial download on the Web site, so you can test the program yourself.

Verdict
If you own one of the supported printers then this is a worthwhile program to buy, especially if you're a heavy printer user. Over time it will save you money and the print quality trade off is an acceptable one. InkSaver is simple to use and pretty impressive overall.

Company: Strydent

Contact: 0870 120 2186

Tags: hewlett packard ink cartridge seiko epson ink epson printer inkjet printer universal serial bus