Printing Monochrome Pages Using a Color Printer

Date: February 16, 2010

New York, NY -- Color printers are certainly really useful things to have, especially if you like printing photos, or you have to print graphics or charts for school or work. However, color ink can be expensive and you may decide after a while that you can live without those prints or you will have a span in your life when you don’t need to print that much in color.

When you reach that point, you can set your printer to print only in black. Inside your printer options. To change your settings, you need to first select the printer you wish you use for this from the “Printers and Faxes” window (inside of XP). Right-click on this printer and select Properties. Under “Advanced”, there should be an option for “Printing Defaults”, so go ahead and click that button. In there, there should be two tabs, “Layout” and “Paper/Quality”. Select the “Paper/Quality” tab and find the box that says “Color”. You can then select “Black & White”, and click “Apply”. Then your default print settings will be changed. If you are going to be more selective of when to use color and when not, you can change the setting each time you print.

All that being said, there is a slight disadvantage to using your color printer this way. Despite your indications that you really only want black and white prints, the color cartridge will be used (to a lesser amount than normal color) to deepen the shade of your text or graphics. So then the question is, can’t I just take the color cartridge out? No. In order for your printer to function properly, all the cartridges must be in place. So even if one cartridge is out of ink completely, you still need to leave it in there until you replace it.

BY ADAM HAIGH, Editor