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Although most of us use a printer on a daily basis for a number of different types of jobs, many people simply print using whatever the default settings happen to be. While these standard settings are generally fine for everyday use, you might be amazed at what your printer can do with just a bit of tweaking.
Get to know the Properties page
The Properties tool allows you to set the print quality, choose paper size and type, and choose colour or black-and-white printing. You can also set the print orientation: Landscape is a horizontal shape that’s useful for spreadsheets and maps, while Portrait is good for most word-processing documents.
To access Properties, look for the button that says Properties on the upper right-hand side of the Print dialogue box.
Use print quality settings that match your needs
Changing your printer’s quality settings is a great way to extend the life of your ink cartridges.
Best quality uses the most saturated amount of ink for crisp black and whites, and the richest blend of colours for images. It’s perfect for official documents like business letters or final reports.
Normal quality gives you sharp contrast and rich colours, but does not use as much ink, so the resulting output is a little lighter. Use it for printing personal correspondence or unofficial documents.
Draft quality is the fastest way to print, and uses the least amount of ink, but it also looks less polished than the other options. It’s a good choice for anything you need to print quickly but don’t have to keep.
Default mode is what your printer is automatically set up to do, usually Best or Normalquality. To change your settings, go to Print > Properties > print quality, and select the setting you want. Click “Set as default” to lock the new settings. These settings will remain until you choose to reset them.
Create shortcuts for different quality settings
No single setting is right for every print job. To cover all your needs, you can create shortcuts, called virtual printers, to the settings you use most often.
1. Go to Control Panel > Printers and Faxes.
2. Click Add Printer. This will start the “add printer” wizard.
3. Select your printer from the list, and choose “Keep existing driver”.
4. Designate a name for the virtual printer that incorporates the setting. Something like: HP_photosmart_D7360_highquality. Do not set it as the default.
5. Click Finish, and the new virtual printer will appear in your list.
To help you save even more paper, ink and time, you may want to check out HP AutoSense technology that automatically optimises your printer settings for each print job.
Check out your Windows® printer settings, too
When you instruct an application to print, the information is sent to a “spool file” on your hard disk before going to the printer. Windows starts sending data to the printer as soon as the spool file has enough information to print the first page, even if the data is still moving from the application to the spool file.
This requires a compromise between freeing your application sooner and getting your printed document quicker. But you can favour one option over the other. To find the spooling settings, choose Start, Settings and select Printers. Right-click the icon for the printer you want to tweak and choose Properties. In Windows 9x and Me, click the Details tab and then select the Spool Settings button. In Windows 2000 and XP, click the Advanced tab.
To minimise your application’s wait time, select Spool print jobs so program finishes printing fasterand then Start printing after last page is spooled. If your priority is to print faster and you don’t mind waiting for the application, select Print directly to the printer.
For more printing tips check out the Colour Printing Centre.
Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
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