In a PC mag I came across the following and not being very savvy I’d be interested to have your comments.
“…But you can trick an ink jet into speeding up, and save a few pounds in the process: turn off the colour. Yep, it’s that simple. Unless colour is crucial for your document, you’re wasting ink and slowing down the printer if you output in colour. Test it. Print a colour page, then print it again in grey-scale.
To do this, go to Start, Settings, Printers and right-click on the printer’s icon. Go to Properties and find the tab that lets you change from colour to grey-scale. Then print the page again. The file we tested took more than 2 minutes to print in colour; the grey-scale version took only 30 seconds. When you do need colour, simply change the settings back.”
The PC magazine is correct, whether you’re printing from a PC or Mac or *nix.
While not techinically correct, conceptually think of it like this: you have a colored pixel, which is 32-bits to define it’s color. Or, you have a black-and-white pixel, which is 1-bit. Let’s say at HIGH quality setting you’re at 1200dpi. A complete 7.5"x10" page in B/W needs 108,000,000 bits of information, which is about 12.9Mb of data for the computer to process and send to the printer. At 32-bits per pixel, you need to process and send almost 412Mb of data!
Granted, that’s pure black-and-white, but you can do the math yourself for varying levels of grey-scale.
My HP inkjet spits out pages faster than I can pick them up if I print in pure B/W or grey scale.
And it’s NOT really the same thing as draft, since draft is generally low quality, 150 to 300 DPI. By using the maximum printer resolution in B/W or grey-scale, you get incredible speed with very crisp text and graphics.
Balthisar, I thought some printers print black by mixing colors & some can print right from the black
cart?. I don’t think its the same for all printers. But thanks for the tech’s on the process.
My Epson Stylus 777 uses separate ink tanks for black ink and color (a trifecta of red/yellow/blue, or somesuch). When I print a document, I can explicitly tell the printer to print in black-and-white, so it will use the black ink and print faster.
The Epson printer drivers also let you choose between “Quality” and “Speed” for printouts, so I can tweak it further. Printing black-and-white pages in low quality (“Speed”) yields about 8 ppm.
handy, you’re right of course. It’s been years since I’ve had a printer like that, and I just plain forgot about them. To print in color, I actually had to swap the cartridges! Then “black” came out as kind of a crummy, muddy brown.
I’m not sure, but I don’t think there are any “modern” inkjets left that force you to swap tanks, i.e., the black and colors ride along with each other, thus negating the problem.
I don’t know if it’s my maturity, my cheapskatedness, or my non-ideal experiences with early color inkjets, but unless I’m printing a photo these days, I just don’t use color, so setting to grey-scale is second nature to me for speed purposes.