There is no option on my MG8100 printer to print in black only. Grayscale uses all colours to print

[reallyannoyed]

I have a MG8100 and it seems that there is no way to print in black and white only. The grayscale option uses all the colours including black to print. I have scoured the web and there appears to be no solution.

I have gone through a ton of colour ink just printing black and white documents. It has cost me a fortune and I've worked out that I can print my black and white documents cheaper by going to the print shop.

As far as I am concerned this unbelievable. A printer that doesn't give you the option to print using black ink only, when you want to print documents! And its not advertised or made known in any way. You have to buy the product and then find out later that it does not have a black and white print option. It seems there are a lot of people out there that are unhappy about this, and the "problem" seems to go quite far back. Why haven't Canon responded by adding this feature?! I wont say it here, but I think it must be obvious. Brings to mind the story of housecleaning product manufacturers that increase the size of the closures so that consumers will use more of the product, which is actually wasteful, so as to shorten the purchase cycle.

This leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. I'm flogging my MG8100, and I am done with Canon for good!

[Canontireduser]

Hi everybody,

I have 2 Pixma printers, a MG8100 and a MG5300, they are quite good if you print in color

Beware if you want to print in B&W when the colors tanks are empty, the printer will simply lock itself and forbid any printing before you replace the 3 (or 4 on MG8100) color tanks.

This is stupid for you but a good way to force a customer to buy stuff he doesn't need. Even if you are not printing a lot of color tasks (I do 80% B&W) those tanks are emptying very (I mean very) fast.

Based on other reports I tried with or without grayscale settings, with or without duplex, I even removed the empty color tanks to try to indicate the printer that I just wanted B&W, no way.

Dear Canon, there is a B&W button on those printers for scan and copying usage, why don't you extend it for printing ?

Another issue worth reporting, there are 2 B&W tanks on those printers, for some reason the printer doesn't use the big one when the small is empty or the other way around but reserve one for some tasks (like grayscale and color tuning) and the other one for pure B&W, so you may have to replace a B&W tank when the other one is full, clearly Canon wants you to buy a lot of ink 🙂