If I print using a “light gray” color, am I actually saving my black ink? My Canon has 4 ink cartridges - a large black, and 4 smaller tanks of blue, magenta, yellow, and black again. Is my light gray being produced by the larger black ink cartridge, or is gray considered a color and thus will use the smaller black cartridge? How is the color gray even formed? Does my printer just spray less ink on the paper?
Will a darker gray use more ink than printing in lighter gray?
I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, and I’d appreciate any thoughts.
Thanks.
Seeing that you have another black (which is probably gray), it’ll probably use that to print gray. How printers produce lighter colors is to make less dots (dithering). This only works until the dots become so sparse you don’t see a continuous color, but the individual dots. Hence the gray ink, which is meant to step in when that happens with the black.
You CAN force your printer to use black ink to print gray, by forcing it to print grayscale/monochrome.
Aside, if you didn’t have gray ink, your printer would probably make gray by blending the 3 colors, instead of sparingly using black. This would probably be more expensive than using black ink outright. I think the reason for this is as above, using black alone would result in dotted, non-uniform coverage.
The word “gray” can mean a whole lot of different colors, most of which are not made up of dots of black. And when you break it down into “warm” grays or “cool” grays, you definitely need the other inks to get the right color. But as **AaronX **said, if you want to save money (and don’t care if it’s a “generic” gray), tell your printer to use only the black ink cartridge.
My Epson printer has cartridges for Black, Light Black, Light Light Black . . . and an alternate Matt Black.
What Chris said. It’s safer to use the printer settings: DPI, black-only ink, and also potentially a “Draft” or “Econ” mode, or a mode meant for lighter-weight papers, etc.
Thanks for the replies, but I’m afraid to admit I’m still a bit confused, and wanted to clarify something.
If I print in grayscale, and choose as my ink color a lighter gray instead of the default black, then I will save ink (the bigger black ink cartridge)?
There’s no way to say for 100% sure without reading your printer’s manual and maybe not even then.
But odds are that if you use the printer’s settings to select grayscale and less than 100% black, you’ll *probably *save ink.
Note that some printers will try to track how much ink they use & declare a cartridge empty & unusable after some predetermined threshold, regardless of how much ink is actually in the cartridge. If whatever measuring technique they use doesn’t account for your grayscale trick you might actually be applying less ink to the paper while the printer’s logic mistakenly thinks you’re applying the full amount. So it’ll decide the cartridge is used up before it really is.
If your printer is like that then you’ll have used less ink but the ink you saved will be unusable.