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Printer uses color ink even when printing grayscale?

O

OzzieGT

Senior member
I have a canon i560 printer. We print a lot of grayscale and very little color, but the color cartridges still seem to be going down. Are there any thoughts on what causes this? I am thinking the startup routine cleans the print head and that 'conveniently' uses ink as part of the process.

Other thoughts? Anyone know much about inkjets?
 
Canon software doesn't let you do that. It won't even let you print when the cartridges are totally empty. Not to mention that can probably lead to a clogged cartridge and/or ink everywhere.
 
Grayscale uses cyan in addition to black on many color inkjets. The newer HP Deskjets do have optional gray in carts especially for "B&W" photo printing:

Gray
 
Yeah our magenta is low now too even though it was fine this morning and we didn't print a single color page. I think we are going buy a laser printer and regulate the canon for color printing only.
 
That's a good move. I did that a couple of years ago when Iwas involved in camera ready desktop publishing masters.

Inkject grayscale always has a bluish or pinkish cast - because pure black doesn't have the required gray tones. 1200 DPI laser stuff is great on B&W photos.
 
If you had bought a five-tank Canon (like the i860 or the current iP4200) it would use the extra dye-based black (BCI-6 black) for gray scale. All recent four-tank Canons (i560, iP3000, etc.) use a mix of the three colors to make black or gray scale. The text black (3e tank, pigmented ink) is not used in graphic/photo mode at all on the four tank models. But that's OK, use clone tanks and you can use as much color ink as you want without sweating it. Just do the best head alignment you can and the gray-scale looks pretty good. Many laser printers really stink at gray-scale graphics - shop carefully. Of course it all depends on the level of quality you need. No clone ink yet for the new series that use the 5 and 8 series "chipped" tanks - unless you want to refill the tanks yourself.

.bh.

PS: this thread belongs in the Peripherals section... .bh.
 
Thanks for the tip. But when I say 'print greyscale' I mean printing web pages, notes, presentations, etc. I just got a great deal on a 2400x1200 lexmark laser printer for $55. So we will use the canon whenever it's time to print photos or color, and use the laser printer for everything else. The issue with clone tanks is I haven't heard or seen any studies of how long they last before they fade compared to canon inks.
 
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