Canon ip5200 ink usage question

[Andvari]

My Canon ip5200 printer is only several months old. I've printed a couple of pictures when I first got the printer, and since then have only printed text documents.

The printer uses five different ink cartridges. One of them is a dedicated black cartridge for text printing. So when I print text, I select grayscale text printing and would assume it would use only the dedicated black ink.

http://www.auburn.edu/~goldema/print.JPG

But my cyan ink has also run low along with the dedicated black. I just replaced them both, as you can see in the pic. But why would the cyan ink be running out if I am grayscale printing text?

 

[Lord Evermore]

The conspiracy to make people buy more ink strikes again!

I say ask Canon. It very well could be some sort of mumbo-jumbo about using the cyan to "optimize the print quality" when printing in greyscale. Might go through all the settings available in the drivers to see if maybe something stands out.

If you print from an application that's only got the fonts set to black, you should only end up using black ink there too, so no need to necessarily set greyscale, but of course if you print from something with various colors that doesn't work.

It seems like you might be better of letting the stupid thing print in color. You sure you didn't just print a whole lot of color pages that happened to use a lot more cyan than the other colors?

 

[oynaz]

The price for black ink and coloured ink for the IP5200 is the same (in Denmark, at least), so I doubt it is a nefarious trick from Canon.

On the same note, why print in greyscale if the price for colour prints is the same?

 

[Andvari]

I was talking about text. Black text. If there is color that I want to print, then I don't print in grayscale. I've been selecting grayscale as a means of trying to "force" it to use all black, since it seems to not be doing that.