Create Printer Profiles

My parents are using their HP printer most of the time to print text documents but every now and then they also use it to print a picture they have shot with their digital camera. Their normal printer settings have been optimized heavily so that the ink cartridges last longer. This includes the exclusive use of black for all text documents for instance and a quality setting that uses as little ink as possible without interfering with the quality of the printout.

Their problem was that they always had to change the settings when they wanted to print a picture that they took with the digital camera. Here is what I did so that they did not have to change those settings all the time. You all know that it is possible to add additional printers to your system. What most users do not know is that you can also add the same printer again and configure it with different settings. What I did was I installed the printer again in Windows Vista.

This had the result that I now had two printer profiles. I started by naming them accordingly. One was named Print Text Documents while the other was named Print Photo. Since the profiles are independent of each other it was easy to keep the text document settings of the default printer and optimize the settings of the photo printer to print pictures in best quality.

No magic involved here, sorry. Whenever they want to print a photo they simply use the second profile with the name Print Photo. It’s theoretically possible to create additional profiles if need arises.