Do it.

Once people find the printer they want and start using it, what are the most important things? Usually, other than print quality, the two most important things are how fast the printer is and how often you have to change the ink cartridges. Printing in draft mode can help with both those issues. Unless you are using your printer for business, a lot of the stuff we print these days just ends up in the recycling bin (not the trash hopefully). Directions from Yahoo! maps, stories from online news sites - these are things we print all the time that usually are used/read once and then discarded. They don’t need to look good. There are things you are going to save that don’t need to look that great either, like order confirmation pages. It’s important you have them, but not important how rich the text looks on it.

Printing in draft mode is also a good way to preview photos you want to print. Instead of waiting two minutes for the photo to start creeping out of your printer so you can see how it looks, you can print it in draft mode first to see what it looks like.

Obviously there are some things you want to print in regular mode like homework assignments, resumés etc. But with today’s printers, you might be surprised at how decent documents come out when they are printed in draft mode. The old days of draft mode meant faded pages you could barely see, but those days are gone.

Lastly, some manufacturers call draft mode different things, like Fast Draft. Whatever it’s called, it’s the first one in the list of print quality when you select Properties from the print box that appears.