Colour toner used while only printing black and white.

Almidec · ‎10-08-2019

Recently I had a cartridge reporting a low supply level at less than 10%. From that point on I made sure that the printer was printing in black-and-white only. I regularly printed the supplies status report to see what was happening with my magenta cartridge. It went from 250 pages remaining to 150 pages remaining to nothing remaining while the pages printed with this supply went up until finally the supply level was so low that I had to change the cartridge. Where did the magenta toner go if I was not using it? How can I print in black-and-white without affecting the level of the colour cartridges?

Repairatrooper · ‎10-09-2019

You cannot eliminate color toner usage completely. Some is always used for performing standard maintenance like calibration pages or greyscale text. You can also set the driver to think the printer is monochrome only.

On your PC, go to Control Panel>devices and printers and right click on the icon for your printer. Next select "printer properties" from the drop down menu and then click on the device settings tab. Scroll down in the list of installable options until you find the setting "device type" and change it to monochrome. Default is usually autodetect.

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Almidec · ‎10-09-2019

Thank you for your comments, repairatrooper. What you say makes perfect sense, of course.

The gist of my question is that although I have been printing mostly in black-and-white I have had to change all my colour cartridges. There grew in me a general impression that the printer was not correctly evaluating the level of toner in the cartridges. When the last toner cartridge came to my attention, the magenta, then I concentrated on it to see what was happening. I made absolutely sure that I was not using any colour and it was not supposed to be depleted. But it was, so says the printer. This time, I can’t believe it.

HP makes its money on printers by selling toner cartridges. There is an inherent conflict of interest here. It is rewarded for overestimating depletion. How can I be sure that I have not been recycling cartridges way too early? When I printed in black-and-white, I was not expecting page counts to go up on the magenta cartridge. Something is logically wrong here.

Can you explain my observations?

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