what uses less ink, plain paper fast draft, or photo paper best.

[emt1d]

What uses less ink, plain paper fast draft, or photo paper best.  I'm not looking for quality, just less ink used.  I also used photo paper, then selected plain paper fast draft.  Not great quality, as expected, but still looking to use less ink.  My guess is the plain paper uses more, because it is more porous. My printer is an hp Deskjet 2050.  My operating system is, 64-bit Intel Core I-7-2670 QM.

Thank You for any assistance

emt1d

[Bob_Headrick · Accepted solution]

The plain paper settings use the least ink, selecting inkjet paper will use more and photo paper will use the most.  Draft mode generally uses about half the ink of Normal or Best modes.  Normal and Best modes use about the same amount of ink (although Best mode takes more passes and time to print).

There are a few other considerations to minimize ink usage:

• Do not run cleaning cycles from the toolbox unless necessary (seldom).  Running cleaning cycles beyond the normal startup and shutdown cycles uses ink and shortens the life of the supplies and the printer.
• Always keep the printer plugged into a live outlet.  Using an external switch such as a outlet switch or power director switch will cause the printer to use more ink at startup.  It may also allow the printheads to be left uncapped, allowing them to dry out.

[emt1d]

Thank You much for responding. I now have a better understanding of ink issues, but begs for one more question.  If I set my printer for plain paper, fast draft.  Then Put photo paper in printer instead of plain paper, would that use less ink than putting in plain paper.

Thank You again for your help

Larry Coe

[Bob_Headrick]

The printer will put droplets of ink on the page based on what it detects the media is (for printers with "Automatic" as a paper type) or the specified media in the driver.

If you select plain paper, draft and print on photo paper it would use the same amount of ink as if you put in plain paper.  The results are likely to be very very poor if you do that, for several reasons:

• The pigmented black ink is not compatible with photo paper, it will not dry properly.  When photo media is selected the printer will not use the pigmentd black ink even to print text, it will mix color to make black.
• It takes much more ink to give proper photo settings on photo paper as compared to plain paper.  Using plain paper draft settings is likely to result in an unusable photo paper page, ruining a $1 sheet of photo paper to save a $0.20 worth of ink - not a good tradeoff.

If you plan to print a lot of photo's you might consider a printer that uses the HP Ink advantage subscription service.  This service is based on pages printed, and they count photo pages the same as plain paper, even though a full page photo may use 10x or more the ink of a plain paper text page.

[emt1d]

Thank you Bob.  I now know what to do.

Thanks again

Larry Coe