Never printed in color, out of photo magenta

[ijustwantbw]

Yeah I know this is a photo printer, but its so **bleep** huge I use it for all my shipping label printing just so I dont need another machine in my office. So it troubles me greatly that all my fast, plain paper, black and white only prints suck up all my color inks. Black ink is still completely full.

It didnt always use to be like this. I was buying new black cartridges for a while but for some reason, through no change of my own, it now only uses all my color inks for black. I've just had to replace all of them recently and I havent made a color print yet. Printer is 3 months old. Is there anything I can do besides switching to a brother laser printer, this is pretty ridiculous. 

[ebiggs1 · Accepted solution]

"... I use it for all my shipping label printing ..."

Right off, as you have found out, this is not the best choice for a shipping label printer!  Any, $50 dollar Best Buy, or Target printer will be a better choice.

Second, if you just print B&W, the black cartridge is not still full.  The problem is the Pro-100 can NOT print true black if it only uses the black cartridge.  It requires all the other cartridges to accomplish this.

If you don't print photos, you really need a different printer.  If you do photos, you still need to get a dedicated shipping label printer.  Otherwise you will not be happy.

[Danny]

Hi, ijustwantbw!

So that the Community can help you better, we will need to know exactly which printer model you're using, and which operating system is on your computer (i.e. Windows, Mac OS X, etc.). That, and any other details you'd like to give will help the Community better understand your issue!

If this is a time-sensitive matter, our US-based technical support team is standing by, ready to help 24/7 via Email at http://bit.ly/EmailCanon or by phone at 1-800-OK-CANON (1-800-652-2666) weekdays between 10 AM and 10 PM ET (7 AM to 7 PM PT).

Thanks and have a great day!

[ijustwantbw]

I am using a newer model laptop running Windows 8.1 on a Canon Pixma Pro-100

[cale_kat · Accepted solution]

ijustwantbw, If your canon driver supports it... go to devices and printers from your windows 8.1 start/tile screen. Scroll to your printer, right click to see the select  "printing preferences" menu and left click to open the menu. Depending on your printer soltware you might see a tab entitled "Features", select this and look for  option to "Print in greyscale". Select print in greyscale and look for a drop down menu immediately below the selection where you can choose to print with black ink only.

Hope this helps, your mileage may vary... 😉

[ebiggs1 · Accepted solution]

"... I use it for all my shipping label printing ..."

Right off, as you have found out, this is not the best choice for a shipping label printer!  Any, $50 dollar Best Buy, or Target printer will be a better choice.

Second, if you just print B&W, the black cartridge is not still full.  The problem is the Pro-100 can NOT print true black if it only uses the black cartridge.  It requires all the other cartridges to accomplish this.

If you don't print photos, you really need a different printer.  If you do photos, you still need to get a dedicated shipping label printer.  Otherwise you will not be happy.

[ebiggs1]

Nix the greyscale option.

The printer still uses the color ink when printing in greyscale. In this, and most if not all other, color printers use all the inks to print greyscale. All the option does is convert the image from color to greyscale, it still uses the color carts. It mixes the colors to make gray
and improve the quality of black and white images.

There are 256 shades of grey.  It is not possibile to print that with one black cartridge. Not even with two or three.