I get printers are way advanced now… but why do I need color(magenta) to simply print in black and white.
In: Technology
If your printer is a 4-color, you have a black cartridge, and should have a “grayscale” option in the settings that forces it to only use the black cartridge for everything in a print job.
Because the people who made printers want you to buy a new printer cartridge.
They make close to nothing on the printers, they make money on the inks.
They’ve configured the computer programming parts of the printer to say you are out of ink, so you go out and buy more ink.
Honestly, I’m not sure either. A typical ink cartridge set consists of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black; the black is for… well… printing in black.
My guess would be that C+Y+M=K, which is perfect if the ‘black’ you’re printing is part of a color print.
The *only* reason is they want to sell you more expensive ink. Buy a printer with “eco tank”. Then you can buy bulk ink without ever needing a cartridge again.
The “black” that gets printed often has a magenta in it to enrich the color and make it seem darker.
You *should* be able to go into the print settings somewhere and force it to print greyscale, but some manufacturers (IME particularly for inkjets) don’t allow this with their default drivers.
Programming to increase their profits. As others have said sometimes you can do gray scale. Mine let’s me get away with that for awhile but eventually digs in and won’t let me print at all.
Photographer here…
The problem are not printers tho, computers are, color profiles to be exact…
Color profiles determine the output of the certine color on the certine media ( Monitor,Hard paper,Soft paper, Toned paper etc. )… So, the software tries to replicate monitor black which is RGB to “paper black” which is CMYK, and that’s simply not a pure black or K because there’s no K in RGB…
Thus, if you want to print with K only you need to adjust color profile to do so, but it won’t be the black you see on the screen,simply because there’s no black in RGB, just combination of Red-Green-Blue and lack of light…
Hope it makes sense…
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