Both of these approaches are on the iffy side — reworked cartridges are sometimes lower quality and refilling sometimes is messy plus some ink seems to be diluted resulting in not so vibrant prints.

The costs of printing are especially bad when printing something from a web page. You sometimes get 3 or 4 pages of extraneous material while printing one page of text. Lots of websites now offer a second page that is better formatted for printing but still may contain info like color logos that you do not need.

Believe it or not, a leading printer maker now wants to help you do less printing. The latest version of a Web toolbar from Lexmark gives people more ways to block such images from coming out of the printer, saving ink and paper.

Some of Lexmark’s tools already exist in standard printer settings, but accessing them normally requires several mouse clicks. Lexmark’s free program makes those functions more easily available. For example, one click converts a Web page into black and white for printing, extending the life of expensive color ink cartridges.

The Lexmark tools even let you eliminate the logos from print-friendly pages.

Although printer companies make much of their money from ink cartridges and other consumables, Lexmark figures it can improve customer satisfaction. Another plus is that most of the features work whether your printer was made by Lexmark, HP or another company.

Lexmark has versions available for both IE and Firefox, although the Firefox version offers more functions. Firefox users tend to be more technically advanced, so they are being offered more customization that might just confuse the average IE user.