Is there a setting to disable color ink cartridges so that my printer prints black and white documents using only black? Selecting just "grayscale" or "black and white" doesn't stop the printer from using the color cartridge to "make" black. I know there's a setting somewhere in OSX to bypass using the color cartridge (I've done it before), but I just can't seem to find it now. Any thoughts?
Mac OS X (10.5.8)
Don't you think that it would have been relevant to include information on what printer you are using?
I personally recall this being a feature in System Preferences, and therefore not necessarily printer-specific. However, it's a Canon Pixma MG6220. It's not any of the options that pop up on the Printer Menu when I go to print. Clicking "Grayscale" alone on the printer menu still draws from the color cartridges. However, as stated before, I have been able to disable this feature in the past (using the same printer), but to the best of my recollection, it was a system setting, and not a setting specific to this printer.
I have not ever seen that option in System Preferences/Printing.
Are you quite sure that selecting Greyscale after selecting Quality & Media still requires the colour cartridges?
I ask this because I also have a Pixma (different model) which uses two different black cartridges, one standard size, the other twice as big, and I have always assumed that that is specifically to allow black-only printing.
But if it, for reasons known only to Canon and God, also needs the colour cartridges, it can't be much! 🙂
I'm quite sure it does, as I just printed around 300 black and white pages (black text only) in Greyscale mode and watched every ink cartridge become depleted pretty evenly across the board. That's when I started poking around to find the setting that bypasses the printer's ability to print in "composite black" (the mode in which black draws from the color cartridges), but with no luck. I should have written it down, as it seems to be a pretty obscure setting. But hopefully someone knows how to find it with relative ease. Perhaps the same function can be accomplished with a terminal command at least.
It might be worth asking Canon for an answer to that, as it seems counter-intuitive to me!
Please post back if you find the answer! 🙂
How to disable color cartridges when printing black?
