Ink Tank printer

[dashku]

I have Canon Pixma G2012 Ink Tank printer, My primary usage is Black/Grey print. This is a colour printer. Even though I dont print colour I should keep cleaning the print heads to avoid blockage. I cant leave the colour tanks without using for long time. It is waste money to refill them often. My question is what happens if I refill colour tanks with Black ink. Yes I know it makes sense to purchase a Monochrome printer, however cost is 30% higher, understandably so due to sales volume etc...

 

[PeterBJ]

The printer uses pigment black ink and dye cyan, magenta and yellow inks. It uses one printhead for black and one for the three colours. The printhead for the pigment black ink has larger nozzles than the printhead for the dye inks. Using the black ink in the colour printhead would most likely ruin it by clogging. I would not use the oigment black ink in the colour ink tanks. Also mixing the two ink types might cause gelling that would also block the printhead.

 

[The Hat]

My question is what happens if I refill colour tanks with Black ink.

There are no shortcuts with these Ink Tank printers, they will get air bubbles or clog if you don’t use them very regularly, and yes you can mix dye black into the magenta, cyan and yellow tanks, but why would you because you can’t use them for B&W prints anyway, better off keeping them the original colours..

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

There are some driver settings which use the color inks even if you select monochrome/BW printing - like borderless printing or printing on glossy paper.

 

[brwinters]

Also, your printer will composite color ink into the black in order to correct dull and biased color on the paper. Black ink tends to look duller, "greyish," more than true deep black. And, the ink tends to be biased, at least on color printers. Pigment black has a green bias and dye black has a pinkish/purplish bias. To correct this, magenta or cyan ink respectively, if not the entire palate, is mixed in.

My G7020, which is a PGBK/dye color palate, uses the magenta noticeably more than the rest of the colors. This is probably more pronounced for me, because of the high number of "white on black" heavyweight cover pages I print on that machine. Solid black background set to high quality. Last I refilled, my magenta was the lowest tank by a quarter or so, give or take the actual reds printed.

It is my understanding that basically all color inkjets do this.

I don't think lasers do this because the toner isn't as susceptible to these issues (correct me if wrong).

There is a setting in almost every general-purpose Canon printer that I've used that allows you to bypass compositing and only use the black ink.

(Also, it's putting tiny yellow dots on the page that encode the serial number, in case big brother wants to know where that print came from...)