Printers

Epic-zero

Hey everyone, I find it really infuriating that my printer won't print a black & white document without using my coloured inks as well, even if I select greyscale.

(A shameless scam on the part of the manufacturers!)

Does anyone know of a printer that doesn't do this?

(epic)

bob_man_uk

a printer that only has a black toner or cartridge?

sorry but most printers do this to stop using so much black ink.

23n1th

A mono printer.

totalsolutions

Cheap printers have only three inks and no black, using the impure colours creates a muddy brown.
Laser printers are the best choice.

Inactive

My Brother Inkjets have 4 cartridges, including a large black cartridge.

esuhl

The Canon Pixma iP4500 that I have has separate colour (cyan, magenta and yellow) cartridges, as well as two blacks (one for adding black to images and one with a different type of ink specifically for printing text).

It's probably the best printer I've owned - easy to set up, quiet, the cartridges last for ages (though we don't print that much) and the print quality is great. I also got a chip resetter so I can buy cheap unchipped cartridges on eBay (cost about £1.50 or £2.00 each).

Not sure if Canon still make them, but I can't recommend it enough!

omen666

Would suggest changingthe driver, sounds like a driver issue to me. What is the make and model of printer?

Epic-zero

Thanks Omen 666 - it's a Canon Pixma MP610.

I did actually 'phone Canon who said that is the only way the printer will print a monochrome document.

To the person who suggested getting a monochrome printer: don't know about you, but I sometimes need to print in colour - specially photos of course.

To the person who who made the comment about 'saving on black ink' (do you work for Canon?): what a bizarre idea! Sorry, makes no sense to me.

23n1th

No colour for me atm. You can't beat mono printers for cost effectiveness of the ink cartridges or speed. I would only really consider a colour printer if I was to print photos but decent photo printers are rather expensive.

omen666

Epic-zero wrote: »

Thanks Omen 666 - it's a Canon Pixma MP610.

I did actually 'phone Canon who said that is the only way the printer will print a monochrome document.

To the person who suggested getting a monochrome printer: don't know about you, but I sometimes need to print in colour - specially photos of course.

To the person who who made the comment about 'saving on black ink' (do you work for Canon?): what a bizarre idea! Sorry, makes no sense to me.

I found these two snippets about your model though which are worth noting:

The one thing that most people don't know is that every Canon (plus all other mfg.)printer dumps all colors of ink to clean the printhead each time you power on. So if you never print anything in color and only use the Pigmented black for text print, you will still run out of all of the other colors. In fact, the printer is set to DUMP almost 1 gram of Black and 1 gram of colors each time you power on if 12 hours has passed. If the time is much longer it will dump even more.

There is one way to reduce this to minimal amount. Don't ever turn your printer OFF. Print a nozzle check once a day. This print shows your printhead condition and uses the Minimum of ink. Since it has printed the printer will not go through a cleaning cycle and suck ink through the printhead just to keep it clean. I guarantee you will use much less ink and you will keep your printhead in excellent working condition.

Also

Even with the grayscale option enable in the printing preference. The printer will still use a composite of the color cartridge to simulate grayscale tones, mostly the blue ink will be used in neutral gray. The pigment base ink will only be used on ASCII text they said, anything else would be a composite gray if grayscale is enabled or just color.

You are better off just printing in color and setting it as draft mode. Since printing in grayscale would use more colored inkto simulate the dark graytones than just using color from the start.

esuhl

Epic-zero wrote: »

Thanks Omen 666 - it's a Canon Pixma MP610.

I did actually 'phone Canon who said that is the only way the printer will print a monochrome document.

That's strange. The Canon Consumables Finder (on the Canon website) indicates that the MP610 uses the same type of cartridges as my Canon printer - cyan, magenta, yellow and two blacks - one for black text and one for images. It really should be able to print greyscale pictures using the black ink - I can't imagine why the printer would be designed to prevent you from doing this.

Oh, hang on - I've just found this info on Yahoo answers that should help you print using only black ink.